Virtual Reality for Addressing Depression and Anxiety: A Bibliometric Analysis.

Virtual reality is an emerging field in mental health and has gained widespread acceptance due to its potential to treat various disorders, such as anxiety and depression. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of virtual reality (VR) use in addressing depression and anxiety from 1995 to 2022. The study analysed 1872 documents using the Scopus database, identifying the field's most relevant journals and authors. The results indicate that using VR for addressing anxiety and depression is a multidisciplinary field with a wide variety of research topics, leading to significant collaborative research in this area. The Annual Review of Cybertherapy and Telemedicine was identified as the most relevant journal, while Behavior Research and Therapy was found to be the most cited journal. The analysis of keywords suggests that there is more research on using VR for anxiety and related disorders than for depression. Riva G. was identified as the top author in producing research outputs on VR-AD, and the University of Washington emerged as the leading institution in scientific outputs on VR-AD. Thematic and intellectual analyses helped identify the main themes within the research domain, providing valuable insight into the current and future directions of the field.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Higher Education in Nigeria: University Lecturers' Perspectives

The entire globe is battling the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, which has caused a downward spiral in many nations' economies, particularly in the higher education contexts. A growing number of universities have either postponed or cancelled academic activities. A few universities have intensified measures to prevent face-to-face interactions, intending to protect staff members and students from this highly contagious disease. This study investigates the COVID-19 impact on the higher education sector in Nigeria. Interview sessions involving seven lecturers across five universities in three geographical locations of Nigeria were conducted. The interview data were gathered using digital applications, such as Zoom cloud meetings and Skype, transcribed into a textual format, and further analysed. Six themes with corresponding sub-themes emerged from the study. In the final analysis, results revealed that COVID-19 negatively impacted several universities. This study presents opportunities for responding issues, problems and trends that are currently arising and will arise in the future due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Nigerian higher education system.

Co-design of mini games for learning computational thinking in an online environment.

Understanding the principles of computational thinking (CT), e.g., problem abstraction, decomposition, and recursion, is vital for computer science (CS) students. Unfortunately, these concepts can be difficult for novice students to understand. One way students can develop CT skills is to involve them in the design of an application to teach CT. This study focuses on co-designing mini games to support teaching and learning CT principles and concepts in an online environment. Online co-design (OCD) of mini games enhances students' understanding of problem-solving through a rigorous process of designing contextual educational games to aid their own learning. Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, where face-to-face co-designing between researchers and stakeholders could be difficult, OCD is a suitable option. CS students in a Nigerian higher education institution were recruited to co-design mini games with researchers. Mixed research methods comprising qualitative and quantitative strategies were employed in this study. Findings show that the participants gained relevant knowledge, for example, how to (i) create game scenarios and game elements related to CT, (ii) connect contextual storyline to mini games, (iii) collaborate in a group to create contextual low-fidelity mini game prototypes, and (iv) peer review each other's mini game concepts. In addition, students were motivated toward designing educational mini games in their future studies. This study also demonstrates how to conduct OCD with students, presents lesson learned, and provides recommendations based on the authors' experience.