Research on impacts of COVID-19 on students' clinical social work career determination in Taiwan

A quantitative method is adopted to survey 197 students at the department of social work at a university in Taiwan from April to May in 2020. The study aims to explore the impact of the new coronavirus on social work students' career determination. The result presents the participants with higher social loneliness have lower "Career Determination of Clinical Medical Social Work (CDCMSW)", and the mental burden feeling, and family relationship are predictive of the CDCMSW. © 2023 Author(s).

Hotel Anti-Epidemic Management System Based on UV LED Disinfection

During the period of COVID-19, it is still inevitable for people to contact with each other based on the consideration of economic development. Therefore, the health management measures for staying in the hotel have become an important part of epidemic prevention. As we all know, ultraviolet (UV) light is an effective disinfection and sterilization method, which has been widely used in many applications. In this paper, a hotel anti-epidemic management system is proposed to disinfect the used rooms by using UV LEDs through WiFi communication with the front desk computer, and therefore it can protect quests from virus infection. © 2022 IEEE.

Mask-Wearing Behavior Analysis by Using Expert Knowledge Acquisition Approach Under Covid-19 Situation

The continued prolongation of Covid-19 has a severe impact worldwide, especially in terms of livelihood and economy. However, in Taiwan, where the epidemic coverage rate is high, the recently confirmed case rate has also continued to rise. One of the possible reasons for this is the improper behavior of mask-wearing. Therefore, this study was conducted to acquire expert knowledge based on the modified Delphi method and collect expert knowledge from pharmacists working in the local drug store. In addition, the expert knowledge acquisition table is adopted the repertory grid approach which was a valuable interviewing technique. Finally, the inference rules are given by using the repertory grid approach. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Implementation of E-Learning in New Taipei City During COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions around the world have closed, affecting more than 60% of students and causing massive disruption to the education system. Taiwan is no exception. For this sudden and dramatic change, teachers, students, and parents all confront significant challenges. In order to make specific suggestions for improvement, the study aims to explore the current state of e-learning in Taiwan and to understand the difficulties faced by teachers, parents, and students. The study conducted in-depth interviews with 20 teachers, 12 parents, and 24 students. The research results show that in New Taipei City, there are barely any online courses for grades 1 and 2, blended learning is mainly for grades 3 and 4, and synchronous e-learning is designed for grades 5 and 6. The main challenges in adopting e-learning in primary schools include, as follows: (i) Teachers, parents, and students are unfamiliar with the user interface of the e-learning platform. (ii) Insufficient hardware and software equipment at home. (iii) Teachers cannot take care of special students. (iv) Communication between teachers and parents is not smooth. (v) Difficulty in assessing learning progress online. (vi) Students are easily distracted from their studies. Based on the above research results, the researchers put forward specific suggestions for future online teaching practices. © 2022 by the authors;licensee Modestum. All Rights Reserved.

Planning and Running a Low-Contact UX Design Workshop During the Pandemic: Challenges and Design Implications

COVID-19’s disruption to global economic activities has affected how UX designers work, with much collaborative work having to take place virtually. This study reports on the preparations for holding a remote UX design workshop, its running, issues that were encountered, and how they were overcome. Based on this experience, the authors recommend that preparations for holding remote UX workshops include ample offline pre-workshop preparation;a playbook for team members who are not physically present;utilization of online collaborative tools;and, where no other suitable options are available, asynchronous working. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The Covid-19 pandemic and Asian Football Confederation match officials. (Special Issue: Asia Pacific sport and social science.)

An essential requirement of sport, and especially elite professional sport, are umpires, judges, referees, and other adjudicators of the rules of the games. Yet studies of match officials, in the social sciences especially, have only relatively recently begun to gain traction. This article traces the challenges and opportunities association football match officials (referees and assistant referees) in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) faced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and early 2021. It provides an overview of the strategies and actions that the AFC took, primarily drawing on analysis of ethnographic observations, documentary evidence and notes from the research diary of an AFC elite referee with the Chinese Taipei Football Association (CTFA). The article identifies key aspects of pandemic-related developments and indicates how these may have altered future processes of training and development of referees in the AFC for good. The article thus offers a distinctive contribution to the development of referee studies focussing as it does on the experiences of match officials outside of Europe.

Effective Practices of Synchronous and Asynchronous Emergency Remote Chinese Language Teaching

This article reports how two Chinese language instructors, teaching at a private grades 6-12 school and a university respectively, transformed face-to-face courses into an online format Spring 2020 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic. First, both instructors' instructional contexts and pedagogical principles are briefly stated. Second, the instructors share their experience on how to conduct emergency remote teaching, categorized into a synchronous format with an emphasis on the interpersonal mode, and an asynchronous format with an emphasis on interpretive and presentational modes. Online testing is also discussed. The authors reflect on their experience of emergency remote teaching and argue that it is time to blur the traditional boundary between face-to-face teaching and online teaching and make the best use of the advantages each can offer in order to improve students' learning outcomes. It would also make smoother the transition between face-to-face and online teaching.

Factors associated with the equivalence of the scores of computer-based test and paper-and-pencil test: Presentation type, item difficulty and administration order

Since schools cannot use face-to-face tests to evaluate students’ learning effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools implement computer-based tests (CBT) for this evalua-tion. From the perspective of Sustainable Development Goal 4, whether this type of test conversion affects students’ performance in answering questions is an issue worthy of attention. However, studies have not yielded consistent findings on the equivalence of the scores of examinees’ answering performance on computer-based tests (CBT) and paper-and-pencil tests (PPT) when taking the same multiple-choice tests. Some studies have revealed no significant differences, whereas others have exhibited significant differences between the two formats. This study adopted a counterbal-anced experimental design to investigate the effects of test format, computerised presentation type, difficulty of item group, and administration order of item groups of different difficulty levels on examinees’ answering performance. In this study, 381 primary school fifth graders in northern Taiwan completed an achievement test on the topic of Structure and Functions of Plants, which is part of the primary school Natural Science course. The achievement test included 16 multiple-choice items. After data collection and analysis, no significant differences in the answering performance of examinees were identified among the PPT, CBT with single-item presentation, and CBT with mul-tiple-item presentation. However, after further analysis, the results indicated that the difficulty of item group and the administration order of item groups of different difficulty levels had significant influences on answering performance. The findings suggest that compared with a PPT, examinees exhibit better answering performance when taking multiple-choice tests in a CBT with multiple-item presentation. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.