I Cannot See You—The Perspectives of Deaf Students to Online Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic: Saudi Arabia Case Study

Being a deaf student in a face mask world: Survey data from Italian university students

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities made face masks mandatory during face-to-face classes and/or switched to virtual classes. Such situations pose a challenge for students with hearing loss as they generate listening conditions that make speech comprehension difficult. This study aimed to explore the listening difficulties perceived by Italian university students with hearing loss (HL) and typical hearing (TH) as well as their adoption of self-advocacy strategies . We measured listening difficulties as a function of teaching modality (face-to-face and virtual classes) and the type of face mask (opaque and transparent) worn by the lecturer. In face-to-face classes, the most challenging situations for HL students involved speech comprehension when groups of students were working simultaneously and lecturers talked and moved at the same time during their lessons. The use of transparent masks, compared to opaque one, by the lecturer did not reduce the perceived listening difficulties . In virtual classes, the greatest listening difficulties for HL students occurred when the lecturer's face was not visible or she/he did not use a microphone, while subtitles and sign language interpreters were speech comprehension facilitators. The TH group perceived the same situations as most challenging both in face-to-face and virtual classes, albeit to a lesser extent than the HL respondents. Despite most students demonstrated proactive self-advocacy strategies to improve speech comprehension, in some listening contexts inactive behaviors still persisted. To reduce the listening difficulties posed by pandemic measures, training to improve students' self-advocacy strategies and educators' hearing loss awareness behaviors, as well as the development of interventions aimed at reducing noise in classes, are essential to improve speech perception among HL students.

Automatically detecting and understanding the perception of COVID-19 vaccination: a middle east case study

Introduction

The development of COVID-19 vaccines has been a great relief in many countries that have been affected by the pandemic. As a result, many governments have made significant efforts to purchase and administer vaccines to their populations. However, accommodating such vaccines is typically confronted with people’s reluctance and fear. Like any other important event, COVID-19 vaccines have attracted people’s discussions on social media and impacted their opinions about vaccination.

Objective

The goal of this study is twofold: First, it conducts a sentiment analysis around COVID-19 vaccines by automatically analyzing Arabic users’ tweets. This analysis has been spread over time to better capture the changes in vaccine perceptions. This will provide us with some insights into the most popular and accepted vaccine(s) in the Arab countries, as well as the reasons behind people’s reluctance to take the vaccine. Second, it develops models to detect any vaccine-related tweets, to help with gathering all information related to people’s perception of the virus, and potentially detecting vaccine-related tweets that are not necessarily tagged with the virus’s main hashtags.

Methods

Arabic Tweets were collected by the authors, starting from January 1st, 2021, until April 20th, 2021. We deployed various Natural Language Processing (NLP) to distill our selected tweets. The curated dataset included in the analysis consisted of 1,098,376 unique tweets. To achieve the first goal, we designed state-of-the-art sentiment analysis techniques to extract knowledge related to the degree of acceptance of all existing vaccines and what are the main obstacles preventing the wide audience from accepting them. To achieve the second goal, we tackle the detection of vaccine-related tweets as a binary classification problem, where various Machine Learning (ML) models were designed to identify such tweets regardless of whether they use the vaccine hashtags or not.

Results

Generally, we found that the highest positive sentiments were registered for Pfizer-BioNTech, followed by Sinopharm-BIBP and Oxford-AstraZeneca. In addition, we found that 38% of the overall tweets showed negative sentiment, and only 12% had a positive sentiment. It is important to note that the majority of the sentiments vary between neutral and negative, showing the lack of conviction of the importance of vaccination among the large majority of tweeters. This paper extracts the top concerns raised by the tweets and advocates for taking them into account when advertising for the vaccination. Regarding the identification of vaccine-related tweets, the Logistic Regression model scored the highest accuracy of 0.82. Our findings are concluded with implications for public health authorities and the scholarly community to take into account to improve the vaccine’s acceptance.

How important is the tuition fee during the COVID-19 pandemic in a developing country? Evaluation of filipinos' preferences on public university attributes using conjoint analysis

In a developing country like the Philippines, it is critical to understand the important factors which lead college students to their current colleges and universities, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study utilized the conjoint analysis approach with an orthogonal design for evaluating understudy's inclination in choosing a college with the various attributes such as the tuition fee, distance or location, employability, academic reputation, recommended by friends and peers, recommended by family or relatives, and the availability to transfer was assessed. A total of 518 Filipino students studying at public and state universities participated in answering the 16 combined attributions about university preference using purposive sampling approach. Based on the utilities estimate, the most important attribute was the tuition fee of the preferred university with an importance value of about 32.839%, followed by the employability rate of the university with about 6% gap difference. The mid-concerned attributes were the distance/location with an estimated of 11.139%, recommendation of friends or peers with approximately 11.689% tying together, and the academic reputation with an estimated of 10.638%. The two least important attributes were identified to be the availability to transfer, having with only about 2.713%, and the recommendation of parents with only 2% difference at approximately 4.453%. The outcomes of this study can aid college chairmen and enrolment specialists tweak their advertising procedures by giving significant data to the chief gatherings engaged with settling college decision choices.

If online learning works for you, what about deaf students? Emerging challenges of online learning for deaf and hearing-impaired students during COVID-19: a literature review

With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, educational systems worldwide were abruptly affected and hampered, causing nearly total suspension of all in-person activities in schools, colleges, and universities. Government officials prohibited the physical gatherings in educational institutions to reduce the spread of the virus. Therefore, educational institutions have aggressively shifted to alternative learning methods and strategies such as online-based platforms-to seemingly avoid the disruption of education. However, the switch from the face-to-face setting to an entirely online setting introduced a series of challenges, especially for the deaf or hard-of-hearing students. Various recent studies have revealed the underlying infrastructure used by academic institutions may not be suitable for students with hearing impairments. The goal of this study is to perform a literature review of these studies and extract the pressing challenges that deaf and hard-of-hearing students have been facing since their transition to the online setting. We conducted a systematic literature review of 34 articles that were carefully collected, retrieved, and rigorously categorized from various scholarly databases. The articles, included in this study, focused primarily on highlighting high-demanding issues that deaf students experienced in higher education during the pandemic. This study contributes to the research literature by providing a detailed analysis of technological challenges hindering the learning experience of deaf students. Furthermore, the study extracts takeaways and proposed solutions, from the literature, for researchers, education specialists, and higher education authorities to adopt. This work calls for investigating broader and yet more effective teaching and learning strategies for deaf and hard-of-hearing students so that they can benefit from a better online learning experience.

Survey on Online Learning at Universities of Slovakia, Czech Republic and Kazakhstan during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The article points out some of the challenges faced by students at the University of Ostrava, Comenius University in Bratislava and Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, who had almost no previous practice in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. The students from the mentioned universities were interviewed to share their experiences with online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 lockdown. In this paper, qualitative pedagogical research in the local conditions of the three mentioned universities is used, with the processing of answers of selected students who were interviewed as an available sample. The students were also asked to describe their impressions of this situation from their social and personal points of view. The focus is on the positive and negative aspects, boundaries, and problems of online university teaching during the pandemic situation, as well as changes in the personal life of the students. The aim of this introductory small-scale study is to provide a basis for future research on the impact that the COVID-19 situation has had on the educational process at the above-mentioned universities, as well as to assist educational providers in foreseeing and eliminating the possible problems of lecturers when establishing an online educational environment. Some conclusions are drawn from the interviews that offer potential for further research in educational science, because many difficulties from the students’ point of view are related to their social status, lack of social contact, technical problems with Internet connections, the carrying out of lectures and the exams of students. The students’ answers are categorized, and each category is described.