Adapting for change: action learning as a method of working with uncertainty

To explore the challenges experienced by Executive Nurse Directors during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to inform future nursing leadership strategies. A qualitative research project involving interviews with 21 Executive Nurse Directors from England and Wales. Participants were purposively sampled and recruited through Chief Nursing Officers and nursing leadership networks. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and recorded online via Teams. Braun and Clarke's approach to thematic reflexive analysis was applied to data analysis. Executive Nurse Directors played a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Six themes are explored: tensions, and adaptive response to personal leadership styles; uncertainty and support at the board level; responding to national political decision-making; the personal and emotional impact of the role and the sources of effective support; the voice and public profile of nursing; lessons learnt and strategies for future leadership development. Enablers of decision-making included effective multidisciplinary working, freedom from normal organizational constraints, support for innovation, and the development of stronger bonds with colleagues. Barriers to decision-making included limited knowledge of the virus and its impact and lack of guidance, particularly at a national level. Priorities, strategies and actions for recovery include recognizing the emotional impact of being in a high-level decision-making role, protecting staff from burnout and understanding the long-term implications of pandemic work for nurse leaders. Future strategies for nursing leadership during public health, national and global emergencies are recommended. This study contributes to the literature exploring the Executive Nurse Director role and their experiences of leading through the COVID-19 pandemic, and identifies priorities, strategies and actions for recovery and learning for the future of senior leadership. The study adhered to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research. No patient or public contribution.

This article aims to report the experience of the researcher in a working group constituted to assist in the uninterrupted maintenance of the academic activities of a public educational institution during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group was constituted in a collaborative institutional effort of technicians and teachers. The researcher works in the technical staff of the institution, as a professional of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), however, also acts as a professor and researcher in the field of technologies in education. This work is intended to history the practices and activities of the group, designed and built collaboratively, focusing on the students and teachers of the institution, seeking to contribute to the existing projects of remote activities. This work portrays the effort to build and apply a set of actions that sought to reproduce, in a virtual teaching environment, the production and dissemination of content and teaching activities to integrate and link to teaching and learning actions in all units of the institution. Through free technological tools, solutions were proposed to incorporate and enrich teaching practices, as well as to promote the creation of educational policies and teacher training. The methodological basis used was that of participant research, which according to Brandão (1990) allows an active and critical positioning as being a possible intervention and search for transformation through the construction of new concepts and values from the collective dialogical-dialectical participation. It is expected that this report will have a significant impact not only on emergency remote teaching but as studies for water education grow. In the State of Minas Gerais, the "Conexão Se Liga" project has so far trained approximately 15,000 teachers, but the project is still ongoing and can serve 60,000 teachers from the state network of Minas Gerais.

Online teaching and learning for the professional development of workers in service is ever pervasive and continually growing. Yet, studies of teaching and learning with technology are mostly conducted in K-12, pre-service, or higher education contexts resulting in a lack of attention given to the in-service or professional development field. This study aims to alleviate the issue by investigating online courses in a professional development context, particularly in a government institution such as the Financial Education and Training Agency (FETA) under the Indonesian Ministry of Finance. By conducting a study in the institution providing online professional development courses, this study focuses on adult learners. There are also more studies investigating learners compared to instructors, even though the latter are reportedly struggling in conducting online courses. One of the struggles instructor faces includes choosing relevant technologically enhanced andragogy that are in line with the learning contents and intents. This happened amidst the growth of online professional development courses due to increasing demand accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Online learning needs to be improved not only in terms of quantity but also quality. By analysing 148 curriculum documents known as the course syllabi, followed by interviewing three gatekeepers and seven instructors conducting online courses at FETA, and informed by prevailing theories of education and educational technology adoption, the present study aimed to uncover practice-based considerations in crafting online course curricula for professional development. Frameworks used in this study include the adult learning principles of andragogy, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, and the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) model. The study found the distinction between various types of online courses for professional development: distance learning, webinars, and web-based learning courses. Distance learning can be supplemented with prerequisite and/or action learning. Web-based learning can be limited to specific learners or opened to the general population of learners depending on the learning content. The study also found connections between learning objectives and the use of technology in online courses. The considerations in choosing internet-assisted course types and relevant technologies for online courses include learning content. Characteristics of learning content are considered, such as range, specificity, and confidentiality. These characters correspond to the specification of learners which are adult learners. Both content and audience are considered in crafting online course curricula. The findings gathered through this study may not only sharpen the crafting of online course curricula but also assist in providing effective support for online teaching and learning. It provides a better understanding of the connection between learning content and the use of technology for online courses in a professional development context meant for adult learners. Such a better understanding of instructors’ considerations helped explain why online course curricula are crafted with certain approaches. It is hoped that the considerations borne by this study can be useful in guiding the practice of designing the curricula for online courses in professional development contexts for adult learners while assisting in providing relevant support for instructors.

One of the sectors affected by the COVID-19 pandemic is the banking industry, where social and economic restrictions imposed to control the spread of the virus have impacted various aspects of bank operations, especially lending. In this scenario, banks face new challenges in maintaining liquidity, managing credit risk, and ensuring continuous lending to customers in need. Thus, this study aims to analyze the extent to which specific factors, such as third-party funds, funding liquidity, and credit risk, influence lending by banks in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research method employed is a quantitative approach involving panel data regression analysis. This approach enables researchers to explore the cause-and-effect relationships among the variables under scrutiny. The data utilized consists of secondary data from banks categorized as BUKU III and BUKU IV, representing a certain size and complexity of banks. The data was collected during the uncertain period of 2020-2021, marked by the pandemic's impact. The analysis revealed that third-party funds positively influence banks' lending during the COVID-19 pandemic. This implies that the greater the amount of third-party funds held by banks, the more likely they are to extend credit to customers. However, funding liquidity and credit risk exert a negative influence on lending. This suggests that lower funding liquidity and higher credit risk make it more challenging for banks to provide credit to customers during the pandemic.

Electricity demand has been disrupted in various countries since many governments imposed comprehensive social restriction policies to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Obtaining accurate electricity consumption predictions in this highly uncertain period is particularly important for building operators to improve the corresponding operational planning efficacy. Nevertheless, developing accurate electricity consumption prediction models for buildings within the COVID-19 context is a nontrivial task. Correspondingly, this research focuses on incorporating publicly available internet data (i.e., Google Trends, Google Mobility, and COVID-19 data) to develop accurate electricity consumption prediction models for microgrid-based buildings during the COVID 19 pandemic. For this purpose, we developed extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), support vector regression (SVR), and autoregressive integrated moving average with explanatory variable (ARIMAX) models. As a case study, we analyzed a real-life electricity consumption dataset of a six-floor microgrid-designed educational building at a technological university in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. The findings show that incorporating publicly online data positively impacts prediction accuracy. The accuracy increases, even more when we use the lagged value of the predictors. XGBoost models utilizing lagged historical values of the electricity consumption, Google Trends, and COVID-19 data of the previous days is the best performing model. However, adding more lagged predictors does not necessarily increase SVR models’ accuracy. Lastly, the ARIMAX models become the worst-performing models compared to XGBoost and SVR models.

Job stress is a universal element that is not only encountered in every individual but also in every organization regardless of its size. Especially, bankers who are under a good deal of stress because of the nature of their work. Stress could result in a decrease in employees’ performance, productivity, quality of labor, and high turnover rate, in addition to some health problems like anxiety, depression, and headache. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perception of employees of one of the private banks in Egypt and their performance in the presence of job stress in the uncertain period of the coronavirus pandemic. The literature review defined the job stressors which are role ambiguity, underutilization of skills, and work overload. Similar studies have been also mentioned for the impact of job stress on employees’ performance in different countries. A descriptive research design was conducted using a survey questionnaire that is distributed among the employees of the bank in all departments and the collected responses were 51 respondents that were taken from a total population of 1,100 employees. The questionnaire is divided into two parts; the demographic profile and the questions related to variables under study. Descriptive statistics are used and the study revealed that the job stressors “role ambiguity and underutilization of skills” has no impact on employees’ performance in the banking field in Egypt. However, it is found that work overload has an impact on employees’ performance and even more in the covid-19 era. 

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19 or Sars-C0v2) pandemic in Malaysia have adversely affected the country in many aspects especially the economy and education sectors. Schools and universities alike are facing challenges in providing quality education to the students especially during the conditional movement control order (CMCO) periods, where many educational institutions have to close for the safety of students and personnel. Many strategies have been recommended to improve the quality of online teaching to enhance student engagement in the teaching learning processes. MOOC or Massive Open Online Courses are one of the alternative teaching strategies to advocate the students to access education remotely. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can be attended by hundreds of students in their own pace and time, which enable them to study from anywhere, at any time virtually. Thus, MOOCs have risen as an alternative option in addition to other online educational platforms. It is time to take advantage of the uncertain period of COVID-19 into an opportunity to develop the MOOCs as an educational tool for our students. The benefits of MOOCs are self-paced, self-directed, interactive and accessible by unlimited users.

This account explores the experience of an action inquiry approach to develop a coaching culture within a public service organisation. We position action inquiry as a fresh interpretation of action learning that draws on a variety of roots and traditions and focuses on the nurturing of the collective capacity to lead through everyday interactions. Working with an initial core group of staff, we expanded our reach through an iterative process to intentionally bring more people into the work. We show how we adapted our original plans to respond to the COVID pandemic, the use of stories to propel inquiry and playback insights into the inquiry process, how we deepened inquiry in some settings and how ultimately being online was an opportunity to connect people across a system that we had not anticipated. We share insights into the commissioning process and of the importance of internal sponsorship. It concludes with a striking, participant-led call to approach scaling differently by supporting the co-creation of local implementation strategies and sponsor confidence in the case to use this approach in more circumstances, where participants in action inquiry explore, rather than assume, what the organisation and its staff need.

In the given article an attempt to consider new possibilities and threats caused by the COVID-19 pandemic for university and college students is made. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data obtained is carried out. To collect data, 226 respondents studying in the RUDN economics department were interviewed. The research showed that most students and teachers perceive online learning and teaching negatively. Most students experience difficulties when perceiving online learning, they don't acquire the most part of information, lose soft skills. At the same time, remote technologies have become the tool to minimize losses in education which has been under the threat of failure for the uncertain period of time, and application of these technologies gave many students the chance to successfully graduate from universities and colleges despite the pandemic and get good jobs.

In 2020, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) braced itself for the challenge of the COVID pandemic. Older, frail adults were among those at highest risk for morbidity and mortality. This study aimed to capture the lived experiences of patients, families/carers and staff on a COVID ward. Thirty participants were included, and data collected through in-depth unstructured interviews. The data were analyzed using interpretive phenomenology. Four main themes were constructed, capturing the collective experiences of the participants. The first theme, the changing and uncertain period of time, describes the shared sense of immersion in the chaotic situation, lack of control and resulting fears related to the contagion. Secondly, challenges of care, focuses on shared anxieties and guilt related to shortcomings in care delivery, and efforts to adapt to the new situation. The third theme, communication and keeping in touch, details the effect restrictions had on efforts to maintain contact and its toll on mental health. The last theme of challenging situations in end-of-life care, reflects experiences of grief and loss shared by all three participant groups. This study adds to the growing evidence base around experiences of the COVID pandemic through exploration of the profound triangulated experience of all participants.