The Reaction of the University Ecosystem to the Pandemics in a Mid-East Country: The Case of IRAQ—A Compared Analysis of Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions

This paper presents an exploratory study on the reaction of the Iraqi university ecosystem to the Covid-19 pandemic, a learning ecosystem with no consolidated tradition in distance learning operating in a country where connectivity is granted mainly by a mobile phone infrastructure. The study analyses data collected from questionnaires filled in by 572 teachers and 2746 students belonging to more than 35 different universities and colleges located all over Iraq. The ecosystem was able to switch to distance learning in two weeks and to generate a reasonable level of satisfaction in the teachers and, even more, in the students, despite the problems that have been encountered. The influence of contextual and individual factors on the opinions and future intentions of both teachers and students has been investigated together with the causal network that puts in relation to such factors. The distance learning experience conducted during the first five months of lockdown induced a relevant change in the opinion about the nature of an educational experience, as well a desire to continue to experience distance and blended learning processes, in slightly more than 50% of the respondents. Future challenges are also highlighted. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

The Italian School Ecosystems Two Years After the Lockdown: An Overview on the “Digital Shock” Triggered by the Pandemic in the Perceptions of Schools’ Principals and Teachers

Two years after the shock undergone by the Italian school ecosystem—due to the lock-down imposed by the COVID-19 at beginning of March 2020—the effects generated by the resulting fully digital immersion have been investigated by a survey administered to a representative sample of school teachers and principals. The analysis of the outcomes, together with their comparison with similar investigations performed in May 2020 and March 2021, shows that the activities carried out in the last two years—from emergency teaching to integrated teaching and, finally, to teaching in a “new normal” condition—have triggered an apparently fast innovation process with beneficial effects on the e-maturity of the system, on the educational processes and on the state of the individual well-being. Although some symptoms of normalization start to be glimpsed, and despite the workload increase induced by the adoption of technologies, the system seems ready to carry out an optimization of the educational processes to include a stable use of didactic activities augmented by technologies and, more in general, of forms of integrated on-line learning. As a corollary, emerges the relevance attributed, in a plebiscite manner, to continuous training (LLL) on learning technologies and digital pedagogy, as well as the need to implement permanent forms of smart working to thin the organizational processes. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

FACED WITH COVID-19, IS THERE A MARKET FAILURE IN PUBLIC HEALTH, AND SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT ADOPT A FREE TREATMENT POLICY?----EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

This paper uses text mining to model 21,403 Chinese news items related to the free treatment of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and constructs China’s free treatment policy index, which overcomes the difficulty a short data time span poses to in-depth analysis on the economic impact of public health emergencies. In addition, the causal network model is selected to study 52 listed companies in the health industry to test whether there is market failure in the field of public health and the effect of intervention measures. The study found that if the government only relies on market regulation and monetary policy (such as interest rate policy and exchange rate policy), market failure will emerge in the public health sector, yielding an increase in the number of infected people. Therefore, on the basis of market self-regulation, the government should use not only monetary policy but also free treatment policy to make up for the market failure in the public health sector, control the spread of COVID-19 and promote the development of the health industry. © 2022, Bucharest University of Economic Studies. All rights reserved.

Causal Network Structure Analysis of Pharmaceutical and Biological Industry under the COVID-19

Nowadays, countries in the world are increasingly connected, and major emergencies affect the development of various industries, which makes particularly important to measure industry association.In this paper, we extract ordinary period structure before the outbreak of the COVID-19 and explode pharmaceutical biological industry network, then apply convergence cross mapping causal inference to describe the industry network, further establish the network of industry network topology to measure node and industry system risk. Empirical results show that the network structure of the pharmaceutical and biological industry is similar in the normal period and outbreak period before the epidemic, and the association within the industry was relatively stable. When the epidemic hit the network, the linkage of the pharmaceutical and biological industry is significantly enhanced, and the systemic risks and network efficiency are higher than usual. The network of pharmaceutical and biological industry is of strong robustness and strong ability to deal with emergencies, which provides some reference for grasping the stability of industry network structure and industry risk management under sudden shocks in pharmaceutical and biological industry. © 2021 IEEE.

Between Awareness and Acceptance: a more mature School Teachers' Perspective on Integrated Learning one year after the pandemic outbreak

One year after the outbreak of the pandemic that provoked a forced and massive adoption of technology enhanced learning practices, followed by a continuous evolution of their delivery modalities (on-line learning, blended learning, parallel blended learning, hybrid learning) and, finally, by a strong commitment to come back to a "new normal", we have investigated, by mean of a survey, the evolution of: a) perceptions and perspectives of Italian school's teachers about integrated learning;b) the undergoing innovation process characterized by unprecedented features and vastness. The exploration has been conducted by integrating perspectives and factors introduced in the past by several models - TAM, UTAUT, DOI, TOE, KAM - to describe technology innovation and adoption processes. We observed a higher perceived teachers' technological and pedagogical preparation, together with a higher readiness of the schools to react to unexpected events or sudden prescriptions. A readiness that should be ascribed mainly to the quality of the management and to an increase in the level of collaboration and cohesion among the actors of the learning process, rather than to an enhancement of the technological infrastructures. Collaboration, indeed, emerges as the main peculiarity of this last year, an engine capable to foster the spread of competences and a beacon capable to guide the choice of teaching practices. The influence of contextual factors appears not relevant and that of the "perceived values" somewhat marginal. As far as the innovation process: the awareness phase developed satisfactory and, in parallel, the acceptance phase also started. The possible transition to the adoption phase appears uncertain and not easy to characterize. At the time of the survey, however, the teachers perceived, the integrated learning as a modality that could be used in the future to realize 36% of the school activities.

A Resource for the Network Representation of Cell Perturbations Caused by SARS-CoV-2 Infection.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused more than 2.3 million casualties worldwide and the lack of effective treatments is a major health concern. The development of targeted drugs is held back due to a limited understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the perturbation of cell physiology observed after viral infection. Recently, several approaches, aimed at identifying cellular proteins that may contribute to COVID-19 pathology, have been reported. Albeit valuable, this information offers limited mechanistic insight as these efforts have produced long lists of cellular proteins, the majority of which are not annotated to any cellular pathway. We have embarked in a project aimed at bridging this mechanistic gap by developing a new bioinformatic approach to estimate the functional distance between a subset of proteins and a list of pathways. A comprehensive literature search allowed us to annotate, in the SIGNOR 2.0 resource, causal information underlying the main molecular mechanisms through which severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and related coronaviruses affect the host-cell physiology. Next, we developed a new strategy that enabled us to link SARS-CoV-2 interacting proteins to cellular phenotypes via paths of causal relationships. Remarkably, the extensive information about inhibitors of signaling proteins annotated in SIGNOR 2.0 makes it possible to formulate new potential therapeutic strategies. The proposed approach, which is generally applicable, generated a literature-based causal network that can be used as a framework to formulate informed mechanistic hypotheses on COVID-19 etiology and pathology.