Exploring the Viability of Online Problem-Based Learning Through the Lens of Students and Teachers

This study aimed at exploring the perceptions of students and teachers regarding the viability of the online problem-based learning (PBL) approach. The study also aimed to report the perceived merits and demerits of online PBL and offer suggestions to improve it further. To achieve these objectives, a qualitative exploratory study was conducted at the College of Medicine, The University of Lahore from July 2020 to November 2020. Employing purposive sampling, 12 students and 11 teachers were recruited, with experience in both online and face-to-face PBL. The perceived merits and demerits of online PBL were inquired in focus group discussions. Moreover, suggestions to improve the online PBL environment were elicited from both stakeholders. The data was recorded, and then inductively coded and thematically analysed using Atlis.ti software. Students displayed active participation, improved learning and self-regulation during online PBL. The participants valued online PBL as a resourceful, convenient and flexible learning strategy. Some demerits of online PBL were also reported, including student passivity, low motivation and poor concentration, which were mainly attributed to the lack of physical presence. Suggestions to improve the online PBL environment included virtual use of simulation patients and infographics, faculty development, student orientation and technical support. We conclude that online PBL can be used as an effective strategic alternative to face-to-face modality. However, certain challenges exist in online PBL that can jeopardise students’ learning processes. Efforts need to be made to fully capture the essence of the online PBL environment.

Support Needs and Interventions for Family Caregivers of Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS): A Narrative Review with Report of Telemedicine Experiences at the Time of COVID-19 Pandemic

Family caregivers of people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a severely disabling neurodegenerative disease due to the degeneration of both upper and lower motor neurons, have a very demanding role in managing their relatives, thereby often experiencing heavy care burden. Previous literature has widely highlighted that this situation reduces caregivers’ quality of life and increases their psychological distress and risk of health problems, but there are relatively few studies that focus on psychological interventions for these situations. Family support is more—not less—important during crisis. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining public safety has required restricting the physical presence of families for hospitalized patients. Caregivers of ALS patients felt increased sense of loneliness and experienced greater difficulties in the access to both hospital and home assistance. In response, health systems rapidly adapted family-centric procedures and tools to circumvent restrictions on physical presence. In this regard, internet-based and telehealth solutions have been adopted to facilitate the routine, predictable, and structured communication, crucial to family-centered care. This narrative review aims at addressing more current matters on support needs and interventions for improving wellbeing of caregivers of ALS patients. In particular, we aimed at highlighting several gaps related to the complex needs of caregivers of ALS patients, to the interventions carried out in order to respond to these needs, and to the changes that COVID-19 pandemic caused from 2020 to nowadays in clinical managing of ALS patients. Finally, we report ongoing experiences of psychological support for family caregivers of ALS patients through telehealth solutions, which have been reinforced in case of needing of physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Arbitration Hearing with Remote Participation: Necessary Innovations that Irreversibly Change Traditions

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic forced most arbitration centers in countries with a wide variety of legal traditions to switch to mass arbitration hearings in video conferencing mode in the spring of 2020. It turned out that hearings with remote participation of representatives of the parties, and sometimes arbitrators, have a number of advantages compared to regular hearings. A number of new possibilities arises and thus compensates the loss of certain possibilities adherent in physical presence of arbitration participants at hearings. The authors argue that most of the obstacles and shortcomings of the new format as a whole can be overcome with modern regulatory development, law enforcement, software, and hardware tools. The paper examines, among other things, the experience of the Arbitration Center at the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, whose software and hardware complex and previously modernized arbitration rules made it possible to safely switch to a new mode of operation. New documents of international origin in this area are also being considered, indicating the need to ensure a balance between the effectiveness of arbitration proceedings on the one hand and the right of the parties to due process and fair treatment on the other.The authors conclude that there will not be a complete return to the previous practice with the end of the pandemic. However, a certain part of the meetings, taking into account the circumstances of the disputes, will return offline, the popularity of various mixed (hybrid) options will increase, which will not be difficult to put into practice due to the flexibility of the arbitration procedure. The flexibility of arbitration and the delegation to arbitrators of a number of issues related to the organization and conduct of arbitration proceedings, which require that opinions of the parties should be requested and considered in order to solve the dispute, makes it possible to ensure the optimal “format” of the arbitration procedure given the specific circumstances of the dispute. This procedure provides its participants, among other things, a reasonable and sufficient opportunity to present their positions, ensuring equal treatment of the parties and adversarial while ensuring the real effectiveness of the arbitration procedure, which allows in modern conditions to properly implement the principles on which arbitration is based.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities: by Davarian L. Baldwin

In today’s politically charged, anti-education climate, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower should be required reading for every urban community organizer and higher education stakeholder. Davarian L. Baldwin blends captivating interview excerpts and thoroughly researched data to tell the stories of the winners and losers in and around well-known universities in urban areas from coast to coast. Cultural differences, policing problems, economic disparities, real estate transactions, taxes, and subsidies are all addressed. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a powerful conversation starter about who really benefits from the physical presence of American universities, and how universities might change their tactics to expand those benefits to communities at large.

International Refugee Law in Crisis: Islands, Incarceration and Neo-Refoulement during COVID-19

Attempts by states to deter refugee movement have evolved to a point that routine and systematic breach of non-refoulement and associated human rights frequently constitutes a central pillar in their asylum architectures. The expansion of state policies and practices under which people seeking asylum are prevented from reaching safe places and lodging asylum claims has accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on examples from Australia and Europe, this article uses neo-refoulement—a concept introduced by geographers Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz—to signal not only the rise in pushbacks at land and sea borders, but also practices that occur well within the boundaries of sovereign territory. These include the use of island incarceration, fast-track border procedures, and denial of legal presence on sovereign territory, even where physical presence is achieved. Such measures have often been introduced under the pretext of responding to situations of ‘mass influx’. And yet, far from providing an adequate response to a so-called ‘refugee crisis’, they serve only to facilitate a greater humanitarian crisis.

Shifting Positionalities in a Time of COVID-19: The Transnational Public Health Doctor and Ethnographer

Ethnographic research is characterised by in-person engagement with individuals and groups within a social setting, usually over an extended timeframe. These elements provide valuable insights which cannot be gained through other forms of research. In addition, such levels of involvement in “the field” create complex, shifting researcher-participant relationships which themselves shape the course of the project and its findings. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many research projects, but impacts on ethnographic research, with its emphasis on physical presence in the field and interpersonal relationships, reveals much about these key elements of our praxis.I discuss how the pandemic influenced the progress of an ethnographic research project, based in Malawi, including consideration of how, as lead for the project, my clinical/“public health” positionalities interacted with relationships in the village and the arrival of COVID-19 in Malawi. This account reveals shifting intersubjectivities of researchers and participants as the pandemic brought changes in the nature of the engagement, from ethnographic explorations into the roles of smoke in everyday life, through fieldwork suspension, and contextualised COVID-19 response. These experiences demonstrate how a basis of reflexive ethnographic engagement with communities can underpin thoughtful responses to upcoming challenges, with implications for future “global health” work, both within and beyond the pandemic context.

The Impact of Taxation Accounting of Value-Added-Tax in the Engineering of the Iraqi Economy

This study analyses the causes behind the difficulties encountered by Iraqi economy in rebuilding, provision of value added tax (VAT), formation and implementation effects in case of applying it to the Iraqi markets. In contrast to accounts that lay stress on Iraq’s statist past, we argue that the sustained decline in formal institutions and poor tax administration is the best explanation for Iraq’s economic decline. In addition to the selected micro-economic interventions, we recommend policies that more dependably and equitably distribute oil rents, such as a universal basic value added tax collection. Our recommendations thus contrast sharply with the approaches that emphasize a reduced role by the state. The aim is to facilitate the development of VAT model under conditions of lowered conflict and greater stability, a binding constraint on development for Iraqi economy. The development process for the VAT operational management in Iraqi markets. VAT operates as a transactional sales tax, often compliance in Iraqi market jurisdiction can be compromised where purchasers are a part of a scheme that operates a fraud mechanism or where supplies are made to consumers without any physical presence in destination countries. In this context, enforcement nexus must be reinforced through several mechanisms suggested in the literature.

Liable for Unlawful Assembly and Riot by Virtue of Liking or Comment on Social Media Platforms?

In Secretary of Justice v Tong Wai Hung [2021] HKCA 404, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal affirmed that the doctrine of joint enterprise, as a matter of statutory construction, is applicable onwards to the offences of unlawful assembly and riot under the Public Order Ordinance (Cap. 245), and physical presence at the crime scene is not a pre-requisite to establish liability. The Court argued that such an interpretation strikes a balance between public order concerns and the need to avoid the risk of over-charging. This note contends that the Court of Appeal’s decision will risk exposing numerous citizens, who can hardly be said to share culpability comparable to that of the actual and principal perpetrators of unlawful and riotous assemblies, to prosecution and conviction on questionable legal and evidential basis.

Underlying variables in the understanding of movement in engineering students

This article describes the understanding of motion by active students taking Newtonian physics for engineering, supported by active learning, during the pandemic due to COVID-19; in addition, an unsupervised predictive model of learning achievement was constructed from variables identified using the principal component analysis technique on the responses. the instrument used is the modified test of understanding graphs-kinematics comprehension. students from two universities in Bogotá, Colombia participated. The results show a lower level of accuracy in students in remote face-to-face mode, compared to the reference group of physical presence; by way of reflection, the forced educational experiment implies resizing the teaching activity in the teaching and learning of movement.