Targeted reflection, mutual understanding, and collaborative working. Building blocks for post-pandemic models in higher education

This introduction to the COVID-19 Special Section highlights the importance for targeted reflection on pandemic experiences, mutual understanding of perspectives and best practice sharing by and across stakeholder groups. Higher education, similar to other global sectors, has been profoundly shaken by the realities brought about since March 2020, and different stakeholders have felt the impact and consequences of the pandemic on a daily basis. Reports of challenges go a long way towards enabling understanding;however, unless these are combined with demonstrations of responses in context and analyses of their effectiveness, they remain at the level of awareness and cannot move towards action. Sharing the lessons learned, alerting to specificities and gaining perspectives have never been more timely, as higher education shapes future models for enhanced stakeholder experiences within increased quality parameters. Notwithstanding the disruptive effect on societies, COVID-19 must also be recognised as an accelerator for higher education, impacting digitalisation, accessibility and creating opportunities for new approaches to educational delivery and collaboration. The papers in this Special Section cover a variety of contexts, moving swiftly from Spain to Poland to the United States of America, India and Iran to return to Europe, i.e. Slovenia. Authors tackle specific challenges experienced by stakeholders, be they students, teaching and administrative staff, researchers or policy makers, and discuss lessons learned, highlight perceived benefits and recommend how these may be translated into policy and practice.

COVID-19 Special Section: Introduction Targeted reflection, mutual understanding, and collaborative working. Building blocks for post-pandemic models in higher education

This introduction to the COVID-19 Special Section highlights the importance for targeted reflection on pandemic experiences, mutual understanding of perspectives and best practice sharing by and across stakeholder groups. Higher education, similar to other global sectors, has been profoundly shaken by the realities brought about since March 2020, and different stakeholders have felt the impact and consequences of the pandemic on a daily basis. Reports of challenges go a long way towards enabling understanding;however, unless these are combined with demonstrations of responses in context and analyses of their effectiveness, they remain at the level of awareness and cannot move towards action. Sharing the lessons learned, alerting to specificities and gaining perspectives have never been more timely, as higher education shapes future models for enhanced stakeholder experiences within increased quality parameters. Notwithstanding the disruptive effect on societies, COVID-19 must also be recognised as an accelerator for higher education, impacting digitalisation, accessibility and creating opportunities for new approaches to educational delivery and collaboration. The papers in this Special Section cover a variety of contexts, moving swiftly from Spain to Poland to the United States of America, India and Iran to return to Europe, i.e. Slovenia. Authors tackle specific challenges experienced by stakeholders, be they students, teaching and administrative staff, researchers or policy makers, and discuss lessons learned, highlight perceived benefits and recommend how these may be translated into policy and practice. © 2022 University of Deusto. All rights reserved.

Empowering preschool teachers and parents for digital education: Influence of the pandemic on children and preschools

In addition to its impact on daily and work lives, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected education delivery. According to UNESCO, nearly 90% of the world's student population has had their learning experiences disrupted by precautions and policies implemented to overcome the spread of the disease. The project 'Home, but not alone: Home, but not alone: Empowering preschool teachers and parents for digital education', a European funded project focused on the exchange of good practices to improve preschool education throughout Europe, will mitigate educational losses by supporting teachers and parents who are the main providers of education for young children. This work describes the actions made to analyse the influence of the pandemic on children and preschools. © 2022 IEEE.

What Has Been the Impact of COVID-19 on Driving Digitalization, Innovation and Crisis Management of Higher Education and Quality Assurance?-A Taiwan Case Study in Alignment with the INQAAHE Virtual Review.

The impact of COVID-19 on higher education and quality assurance (QA) has already elicited global attention and discussion. QA agencies and networks quickly learned to adapt in order to carry out assessments, accreditations, recognitions, and reviews in a full virtual mode. These practices include using shared folders for virtual desk review, video conferencing platforms for interviews, and virtual site visits. In order to respond to the 2020 pandemic, The International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) swiftly adopted a virtual mode of the GGP review exercise for the GGP alignment applicants. The Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT) was the first case that underwent a thorough virtual review process of GGP alignment during the 2020 pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to outline the impact of the pandemic in Taiwan higher education as well as provide the meta-analysis of the virtual review process of the INQAAHE GGP alignment by using HEEACT as a case study.

Using long temporal reference units to assess the spatial accuracy of global satellite-derived burned area products

In recent years, the growing availability of global satellite-derived burned area (BA) products has led to the development of methods and protocols to rigorously estimate their accuracy metrics. These protocols are based on design-based inference and provide unbiased estimators of various dimensions of accuracy. Current procedures consider the spatial and temporal dimension when obtaining the independent reference data used to assess accuracy, commonly based on the Landsat imagery archive as the basic source. The protocol in which the temporal dimension is addressed in the reference data impacts the accuracy metrics. For example, the 8–16-day sampling units usually recommended in Stage 3 BA validation protocols may result in confounding of spatial and temporal classification errors. However, both errors have different implications from a user's perspective, depending on whether the spatial detection or the temporal dating are relevant. While maintaining the fundamentals of current validation protocols, this study presents a new approach based on long temporal reference units (> 48 days) to diminish the influence of temporal reporting (i.e., dating errors) on the spatial accuracy estimates. This methodology is applied to estimate the accuracy of several global BA products for the period 2017–2019, including two European BA products, the FireCCI51 and C3SBA10, and NASA's standard BA product, the MCD64A1 collection 6 (MCD64C6). Global estimates showed similar performance for the three products;BA commission errors ranged from 17.2% ± 1.1% for C3SBA10 to 19.4% ± 1.1% for FireCCI51, and BA omission errors ranged from 43.1% ± 1.9% for FireCCI51 to 49.3% ± 2.2% for MCD64C6 (± values are one standard error). The total burned area was consistently underestimated in all products. These errors are much lower relative to those obtained in recent Stage 3 validation exercises based on short temporal reference units, which estimated global commission and omission errors greater than 40% and 70%, respectively. Thus, this study demonstrates that using long reference units provides a method to address the impact of BA product dating errors on estimates of spatial accuracy metrics, particularly for those products with lower temporal resolution or for areas with greater cloud coverage. Validation methods developed in this study may contribute to improving future protocols adopted by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Land Product Validation (LPV) subgroup. • Stage 3 validation of FireCCI51, C3SBA10 and MCD64A1 c6 burned area products. • Implementation of long temporal reference units on Google Earth Engine. • Error estimates from long reference units are much lower than from short units. • Impacts of dating errors in spatial accuracy assessment are greatly reduced. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Remote Sensing of Environment is the property of Elsevier B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The rules for online clinical engagement in the COVID era.

Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has generated a need to rapidly increase online consulting in secondary care, an area in which it has previously been underutilised. We sought to review the guidance on conducting remote consultations and found that while there is a large amount of information about the implementation of remote consultations at an organisation level, there is a paucity of high-quality papers considering the guidelines for online consultations alongside practical advice for their implementation at the individual level. We reviewed guidelines from reputable medical sources and generated practical advice to assist practitioners to perform safe and effective video consultation. Additionally, we noted reports in the literature of a lack of transparency and resulting confusion regarding the choice of telemedicine platforms. We, therefore, sought to summarise key characteristics of a number of major telemedicine platforms. We recognised a lack of clarity regarding the legal status of performing remote consultations, and reviewed advice from medico-legal sources. Finally, we address the sources of these individual uncertainties, and give recommendations on how these might be addressed systematically, so the practitioners are well trained and competent in the use of online consultations, which will inevitably play an increasingly large role in both primary and secondary care settings in the future.

Confidence vanished or impaired until distrust in the doctor-patient relationship because of COVID-19: Confidence vanished or impaired until distrust: "COVID" in relationship.

Since Hippocrates, the cornerstone of medical practice has been the doctor-patient relationship. The question here is whether these basic principles are still compatible with this unusual COVID-period. This pandemic represents a serious threat to human health, leading to profound changes in behavior in daily life but also in health care. Because of limited resources, health-managers must choose well-balanced solutions able to protect patients and citizens on the one hand and to provide maximal benefit for the society on the other hand. We are going through a moment of rupture that we must acknowledge. Here, we discussed how the doctor-patient relationship could be compromised. Doctors are focused on cares whereas patients are focused on scare. Profound changes occur presently, from the way we present ourselves to each other (including the masks), the poor conditions for physical examination, the mental suffering of both patient and caregiver until sometimes terrible end-of-life conditions. The historical point-of-view helps us to keep in mind previous experiences, and the philosophical perspective helps to contextualize this unedited situation. We should stop briefly our daily rush to put these considerations into perspective to overcome these challenges. Nothing is as effective as trust: let's rebuild it.