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This paper aims to understand what motivates students at universities in Indonesia to continue using Online Collaborative Tools (OCTs) for their collaboration work. Utilising OCTs is crucial as the COVID-19 pandemic hit us in 2019 and forced all of us, particularly those who studied at university, to work online as precautionary measures. This research employs the Post-Acceptance Model of Information Systems (IS) approach to understand this issue. For an OCT to continue use, performance: effectivity, efficiency, and certainty is the key determinant, and perceived usability: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment mediates confirmation and satisfaction and the intention to continue use. A total of 354 participants are involved in the data analysis employing Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Our results revealed that while the relationship between confirmation and satisfaction is partially mediated by perceived ease of use and enjoyment, the relationship between confirmation and intention to continue use is also partially mediated by perceived usefulness and enjoyment, and satisfaction. We found that the intention to continue using the OCT can be determined by 67.9% (substantial) of the variance of the model. Our research contributes theoretically to the IS research in this context and practically to the OCT discourse. Limitations and future research directions are discussed © 2023, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning.All Rights Reserved.
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COVID-19 hits the global supply chains in a non-paradigm manner unfolding new and systemic complexity. Therefore, the unexpected and frequent disruptions forced the concern of preventing or creating supply chain resilience capabilities. This paper aims to provide theoretical and practical reflections on resilience in supply chains of essential goods during pandemics using a systems approach. Documental research was performed in order to characterize business practices in consulting reports and interviews with managers published in business communication media. Thus, a careful content analysis was carried out, including the coding and categorization of the leading practices indicated by these vehicles. We suggest categories of resilience factors as new concepts to face the new normal in the supply chains. These categories are Technology and People, Sourcing, Customer, Ecosystem, and Financial Assets. The systems approach consists of more qualified supply chain management stimulating several inputs and synchronized actions to sense and respond to the external environment dynamics.
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The rapid changes in socio-economic and environmental factors worldwide have resulted in natural and man-made disasters becoming increasingly difficult to manage. The emergence of systemic threats that are cross-border, complex, ambiguous, and uncertain in nature, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has made traditional risk management methods inadequate. Many countries, including India, are struggling to address the challenges posed by these systemic vulnerabilities, leading to unresolved policy and governance problems. This research emphasises the need for comprehensive and proactive risk management methods that can address the challenges posed by systemic vulnerabilities, rather than reactive and fragmented approaches. The research identifies crucial turning points in India's disaster management history and explores the prospects for improved disaster risk governance in the country. The report underlines good advances in disaster administration in India, but it also emphasises the need for more systemic development in overall disaster risk management. The research identifies key design principles for India's systemic risk management that can help improve disaster risk management. This understanding can aid in developing effective frameworks, policies, and strategies to control systemic disaster risks and align with major international objectives such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. © 2023
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The U.S. public health enterprise is a complex system of public and private partners, loosely coupled, which work together to improve the public's health. This scoping review utilized peer-reviewed and grey literature to understand systems approaches may be used in the design or enhancement of public health governance structures and service delivery mechanisms. Titles and s were screened against the research question and retained materials were reviewed in full. The final analytic sample included 34 articles from an initial pool of 1128 unique citations that collectively described 25 systems approaches. The findings indicate that few avenues may be present to guide design or enhancement of public health systems when needs arise, such as in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scarcity of literature on this topic presents a challenge, and further analytical studies are needed to inform evidence-based systems design strategies and applications. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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This essay explores the broader implications for education of the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: What can COVID teach us? The case is made that COVID is inviting us to consider a relational universe, and what a pedagogy of presence would look like. It takes a futures perspective and is therefore, unabashedly speculative. It draws on the author's many years as both a teacher and as a university lecturer in cultural change and futures studies. The essay speaks to the pedagogical imagination as a tool for rethinking learning and our collective futures. The paper concludes that love, intimacy, and presence are very much part of educational and cultural discourses and that though currently eclipsed by a technocratic and neoliberal discourse, they are being called forth as a possible response to the Covid pandemic.
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The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the importance of being able to understand complex computational models for everyday life. To make sense of the evolving predictive models of the COVID-19 pandemic, global citizens need to have a firm grasp of both systems thinking (ST) and computational thinking (CT). ST is the ability to understand a problem or phenomenon as a series of interconnected elements that produce emergent behaviors. CT involves decomposing a problem into quantifiable elements represented in an algorithmic form that can be interpreted or calculated by either a computer or a person. One new framework seeks to support student engagement in ST and CT by contextualizing these two types of thinking within the practice of constructing computational models. This framework explores how various aspects of ST and CT are embedded within different modeling practices, as well as how these modeling practices can help students as they construct, revise, and use computational models. This article explores how students interact with the various aspects of ST and CT as they build and refine computational models using SageModeler (a free web-based semi-quantitative system modeling application) in a chemistry unit on evaporative cooling. Through the examples presented in this article, the authors illustrate ways in which this framework can inform curriculum design and pedagogical practice.
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Although some education institutions have implemented open or online education in line with their own needs so far, distance education did not have national recognition until the pandemic that swept the world at the beginning of 2020. After this date, many institutions underwent transformation from conventional face-to-face education to distance or online education, and they had to change their programs accordingly. For this reason, this simultaneous explanatory mixed method study was conducted to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of distance education program of an English language institution situated in the northern part of Turkey. Five English language instructors and 403 English preparatory department students, five of whom were also interviewed, participated in this study. 'Distance Education System Evaluation Scale (DESES)', semi-structured interviews, observational journals and institutional documents were used as data collection tools. The results of quantitative data showed that students were mostly satisfied with instructors and least satisfied with the content of the program. Moreover, it is found out that students with higher grades gave high scores to DESES. On the other hand, from the results of qualitative data, while it is understood that the program was criticized negatively in terms of socialization, technical problems, teacher's mood, pacing schedule, registration, attendance, feedback, assessment, language skills and distance education pedagogy, positive themes emerged as time and expenses, technical infrastructure, instructors and psychological factors. The results show that there are many issues that need to be considered for distance education implementations and pedagogy.
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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which began in 2019, has far-reaching ramifications, including economic losses and health challenges that still affect various parts of the world. During our review, we learned that the entire world is working to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. We explore ways that may lower the danger of SARS-CoV-2 contamination and useful strategies to avoid the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 spreading through food. While hygienic protocols are required in the food supply sector, cleaning, disinfection, and the avoidance of cross-contamination across food categories and other related goods at different stages of the manufacturing process remain especially important because the virus can survive for long periods of time on inert materials such as food packaging. Furthermore, personal hygiene (regular washing and disinfection), wearing gloves and using masks, garments, and footwear dedicated to maintaining hygiene provide on-site safety for food sector personnel, supply chain intermediaries, and consumers. Restrictions imposed in response to the pandemic (e.g., closure of physical workplaces, canteens, cafes, restaurants, schools, and childcare institutions), changes in household grocery shopping frequency, individuals' perceived risk of COVID-19, income losses due to the pandemic, and sociodemographic factors are among the factors. The conclusions drawn from this study consider the implications of healthy diets, food system resilience, behavior change, and nutritional imbalance for policymakers and food supply chain participants, as well as the antimicrobial effects of vitamins and nutrients. During a public health crisis, people should eat less, necessitating preventive policies and nutritional advice to deal with this.
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Disasters are becoming increasingly common, unexpected, and difficult as a result of the rapid environmental and socioeconomic changes occurring at several levels. They are often the result of systemic risks marked by complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, and cross-border consequences, very much like the continuing worldwide Covid 19 epidemic. These systemic risks outperform traditional risk management practices, posing new, unsolved policy and governance issues. This study aims to assess the origins of systemic risk thinking - particularly in relation to disaster risks, identify key inflection points in its evolution, and identify areas of opportunity in the governance of such risks by building on existing research and conducting a qualitative review of state-of-the-art literature published by academia, industry, and government. The study's findings indicate a positive shift in the recognition of systemic disaster risks, but they also underscore the need for further maturity in its management and governance. To increase holistic management of disaster-related systemic risks and coordinate an effective policy response, this research proposes the essential design principles and conceptual framework for Integrated disaster resilience (IDR) based on a ‘Whole Systems Approach'.
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As malaria cases continue to decline in Asia, an integrated service delivery approach is ever more urgent to ensure that no malaria and fever cases are missed, and that malaria health workers continue contributing to broader infectious disease control efforts. However, despite its perceived merit, translating integrated surveillance into practice poses several systemic challenges. This article aims to identify what is hindering improved processes for integrating diagnostic and surveillance services for febrile illnesses. Data from peer‐reviewed and grey literature were reviewed using a systems approach based on the World Health Organisation health systems building blocks to fully understand the connections between different elements and system implications of integration. We include snippets from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia and Nepal, highlighting expanded diagnostic integration best practices. This review provides a foundation for ‘integration roadmaps’ that can be adapted to different contexts and guide national stakeholders on the operational and political steps for a successful integration model. Such a model can support malaria elimination efforts and serve as a public health tool in the context of disease surveillance and regional health security.
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In 2020, health systems have been affected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, causing an influx of COVID-19 related visits and a sharp decline in non-emergency and elective visits. To mitigate the spread of COVID-19, healthcare systems - including the University of Virginia Health System - reduced ambulatory visits and implemented various social distancing measures, resulting in a drastic change in the patient admittance process. The focus of this work is to accurately characterize the effect of COVID-19 on one of the UVA Internal Medicine, Primary Care clinics, and where possible, to refine and optimize patient flow through the appointment process while accommodating public health restrictions. To achieve these goals, the team adopted a systems approach, which involves the iterative process of problem identification, analysis, and testing recommendations. The first phase of the project focused primarily on establishment of the current state and problem identification. The appointment process contains six major elements: scheduling, sign-in/remote registration, check-in, rooming, check-out, and telemedicine. Through extensive discussions with the clients, surveys of clinic staff, in-person observation, and data collection and analysis, the capstone team was able to understand the pandemic's impact on the clinic's patient flow and identify key problem areas at each stage in the appointment process. The team then used these insights to develop informed recommendations for these pain points. The second phase of the project consisted of formulating trials within UVA health restrictions and guidelines to test the impact of our recommendations. Through a pilot of a new remote registration process, on-time patients increased from 68% to 75%, nurse perceived workload decreased significantly, and the arrival process became more predictable. From this work, the team was able to develop a more generic framework for how health systems might assess and address patient flow issues under normal circumstances as well as during future pandemics.
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Background: Countries, including India, were quick to adopt telemedicine for delivering primary care in response to the widespread disruptions due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This expeditious adoption was critical and the challenges faced during this exigency could guide the design and delivery of future telemedicine applications toward strengthening primary healthcare services. Methods: To identify the challenges in delivering primary care via telemedicine technology in the Indian context, a scoping review was conducted. Drawing from the systems approach in healthcare delivery, the review findings are summarized at four levels, patient, provider, healthcare organizations, and policy. Results: The initial search yielded 247 articles and 13 met our inclusion criteria. This review highlighted that telemedicine facilitated the continuity of care during COVID-19 but not without challenges. Low levels of education and computer literacy along with the language barriers posed the predominant challenges at the patient level. Providers had concerns related to digital literacy, clinical process flows, legal liabilities, and unethical behavior of the patients. The policy-level challenges include data privacy and security, reimbursement models, unethical behavior by the patient, or provider, and regulating prescriptions of psychotropic drugs. A lack of an integrated telehealthcare model covering diagnostics, prescriptions, and medication supply mirrored the existing fragmentation of care delivery. Conclusion: Telemedicine has the potential to improve primary healthcare delivery even beyond COVID-19. Currently, telemedicine applications in India are only facilitating a remote consultation wherein an integrated person-centered care is lacking. There is a need to acknowledge and factor in the inter-connectedness of health system elements for ensuring an effective and efficient healthcare delivery via telemedicine.
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This article explores several aspects of digital transformation, including definition, enabling technologies, and strategies. It argues that firms seeking to maximize the impact of their digital transformation strategy should aim to build a Sustainable Business Model (SBM). In addition, it introduces the seven articles of the Special Issue. Overall, the article takes a systems approach that appreciates the dynamic complexity of digital transformation and suggests some directions for future research.
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The global pandemic changed the world forever and altered our understanding of the current and future challenges that humanity faces. It influenced public sentiment, caused new trends, varied group aspirations and led to destructive processes. This article presents a cognitive model for analyzing the pandemic-related crisis in the Latin American region within the paradigm of neo-Marxism. For operational purposes, a decomposition of the conceptual “North-South” and “center-peripheral” divide was carried out, the features of modern international relations and the interpretation of global governance mechanisms were rethought. The article shows how the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the ruthless anti-humanism and selfishness of the “North” and the tendency to conserve extreme poverty of the “South”. It also revealed such deleterious effects of the pandemic as intensified trade wars and disrupted international logistics. The idea of globalization as the best model of interaction between “center” and “periphery” is in doubt. © 2022. All Rights Reserved.
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A significant contributor to the waste stream is the domestic single-use plastic used in households, being the final disposal in most cases the local landfill. There is a significant opportunity to promote resource recovery and efficiency through the introduction of circular economy strategies. However, the knowledge and management of post-consumer plastic waste in the country is poor, and there is a lack of an efficient collection and sorting system. In this context, spatial information on domestic plastic waste generation (DPWG) is essential for recycling decision-making. The integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the Global Positioning System (GPS) shows an opportunity to collect, mapping, and analyse spatial DPWG issues. Thus, this paper had a double objective. The first was to assess the evolution of eight different types of plastic waste in the city's households and their daily per capita generation between 2019 and 2021. The second objective was to provide a complete geo-referenced information on the quantities and typologies of domestic plastic waste (DPW) produced in Guayaquil and analyse how the flows have shifted throughout the years. The results showed that PET is the most generated, recording 97.76% and 100.00 % of the households who generate this type of plastic for 2019 and 2021, respectively, with an average of 13.08 and 15.13 g/day/c. Following, we had HDPE, PP and PVC occupying the second, third and fourth place for 2019 with 5.86, 3.05, 2.54 g/day/c, respectively. On the other hand, for 2021, PP (7.43 g/day/c), HDPE (5.92 g/day/c), and LDPE (3.99 g/day/c) occupied the second, third and fourth, respectively. According to the spatial maps, the DPW increment is in most of the popular zones. These popular zones are neighborhoods with a considerable quantity of population and limited basic services. Most of these people live in extreme poverty, being a possible relation between the COVID-19 lockdown and the increasement of DPW. © 2022 Elsevier B.V.. All rights reserved.
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Online food delivery usage has soared during the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic which has seen increased demand for home-delivery during government mandated stay-at-home periods. Resulting implications from COVID-19 may threaten decades of development gains. It is becoming increasingly more important for the global community to progress toward sustainable development and improve the wellbeing of people, economies, societies, and the planet. In this perspective article, we discuss how the rising use of these platform-to-consumer delivery operations may impede advances toward the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, online food delivery services may disrupt SDGs that address good health and wellbeing, responsible consumption and production, climate action and decent work and economic growth. To mitigate potential negative impacts of these meal delivery apps, we have proposed a research and policy agenda that is aligned with entry points within a systems approach identified by the World Health Organization. Food industry reforms, synergised public health messaging and continuous monitoring of the growing impact of online food delivery should be considered for further investigation by researchers, food industry, governments, and policy makers.
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In this paper, we articulate the challenge of multiple intersecting policies for the realization of rural broadband networks employing dynamic spectrum access (DSA). Broadband connectivity has been identified as a critical component of economic development, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, and rural communities have been significantly (and negatively) affected by the lack of this important resource. Although technologies exist that can deliver broadband connectivity, such as 4G LTE and 5G cellular networks, the challenges associated with efficiently deploying this infrastructure within a rural environment are multi-dimensional in terms of the different dependent policy decisions that need to be considered. To resolve this issue, we describe how systems engineering tools can be used for representing these intersecting policies such that system configurations can be optimized for efficient infrastructure deployment and operations. One technology requiring increased attention is DSA, where licensed and emerging wireless services can coexist together via spectrum sharing. However, implementation of this technology is challenging, where highly efficient Radio Access Technology (RAT), available spectrum, and user requirements need to be precisely aligned. All these elements to be configured are typically described by independent policies. While DSA is more complicated than previously used spectrum allocation schemes, inter-policy gaps occur that ultimately decrease the network’s efficiency. Consequently, a systems engineering framework has the potential to obtain the optimal solutions although the systems and wireless communities conceptualize and scope problems differently, which can impede collaboration. We present the use case where 4G LTE RAT technology employing DSA applied to digital terrestrial television (DTT) frequency bands can yield spectral efficiency loss when the different policy dimensions are not sufficiently accounted for within the use case. Computer simulations have shown that in an example rural scenario the availability of rural broadband can increase from 1% to 21% of locations if the inter-policy gaps are removed. Author
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A human factors and ergonomics (HFE) systems approach offers a model for adjusting work systems and care processes in response to a healthcare crisis such as COVID-19. Using the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model of work system and patient safety, we describe various work system barriers and facilitators experienced by healthcare workers during the COVID-19 crisis. We propose a set of five principles based on this HFE systems approach related to novel pandemic: (i) deferring to local expertise, (ii) facilitating adaptive behaviors, (iii) enhancing interactions between system elements and levels along the patient journey, (iv) re-purposing existing processes and (v) encouraging dynamic continuous learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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Consumers have shifted away from traditional transactions to online shopping as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital social life, and staying at home. This has a significant impact on the volume of transactions for several ecommerce platforms, including Shopee, which must continue to improve customer satisfaction. One way to accomplish this is to improve the accuracy of the automatic category recommendation, which currently contains a significant number of errors made by the seller. The Shopee Data Scraper was used to collect data, and two qualitative analyses, namely content and thematic analysis, were used to determine how many instances of automatic category recommendation fraud were committed by the seller.According to the content analysis, there is a 29 percent error in product category selection. Meanwhile, 75.1 percent of products should be classified separately but are instead classified as 'others.' Following that, 72.7 percent of product titles contain the same words as existing categories.From this research, we managed to get an analysis of the percentage of errors in the automatic category recommendation mechanism from the Shopee platform which causes sellers to place their products in the wrong category so that they can be used for suggestions for improvement or further research. © 2021 IEEE.
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Emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, require systematic strategies to assist in the discovery of effective treatments. Drug repositioning, the process of finding new therapeutic indications for commercialized drugs, is a promising alternative to the development of new drugs, with lower costs and shorter development times. In this paper, we propose a recommendation system called geometric confidence non-negative matrix factorization (GcNMF) to assist in the repositioning of 126 broad spectrum antiviral drugs for 80 viruses, including SARS-CoV-2. GcNMF models the non-Euclidean structure of the space using graphs, and produces a ranked list of drugs for each virus. Our experiments reveal that GcNMF significanlty outperforms other matrix decomposition methods at predicting missing drug-virus associations. Our analysis suggests that GcNMF could assist pharmacological experts in the search for effective drugs against viral diseases. ©2021 IEEE