My thesis explores older adult lifelong learners’ experiences in transitioning their continued education participation to an online model. This research acknowledges and situates itself in the geragogy contexts of older adult learners, drawing on their experiences of the pandemic and lifelong learning, in addition to their opinions on education for older adults. As such, a case study methodology was employed so that this case could be studied within boundaries created by the pandemic. In my study, 25 older adult learners participated in individual interviews and provided their opinions and perceptions about their experiences with the pandemic and its effect on their learning ambitions. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted these individuals differently based on their motivations and previous experiences with technology. Four distinct dialogue groups emerged based on the motivations that older adults have to participate in lifelong learning, which are social or instrumental, and also the opinions they have about technology, which are either positive or negative. The four dialogues are distinct in that they each hold alternate opinions about the two issues raised (motivators and opinions on technology) but there were no major identifiers within the groups that could characteristically distinguish one from another. The results indicate that not all discourses of lifelong learners are reducible to identities or recent experiences. My findings suggest that potential refinement in program delivery based on specific user needs could improve the experiences that older adults have in the virtual classroom, and that it is crucial to the administration of lifelong learning that older adults' unique needs are addressed in a collaborative manner. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This study investigated how older adults, who pursue lifelong learning in-person, have interpreted their transition to online learning because of COVID-19 pandemic meeting restrictions. Lifelong learners have had to transition from in-person learning to virtual formats, which has encouraged new older adults to become lifelong learners, and also for some lifelong learners to drop out of the practice entirely. The key goal of the study was to describe the Transitioners, New learners, and Dropout learners' experience with lifelong learning with respect to COVID-19’s impacts on their participation. Interviews were conducted with individuals who fell into these three categories and, through their responses, distinct dialogues emerged to describe their motivation to participate in lifelong learning, and their opinions on using technology as a means to access it. Confirming the motives to participate and how technology is appreciated by lifelong learners enables us to better develop and implement lifelong learning.

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The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how employees at a mid-sized public university in the South experienced working from home during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-2021. Most employees in higher education settings were affected in some way by the coronavirus pandemic that hit the United States in the spring of 2020. Administrative, and clerical and support staff had to determine how to continue to provide the university with services while coordinating working from home. Now that we have experienced working from home, will that experience change the future of how staff work in higher education? For many, this was a first-time experience working from home, and it created a new set of challenges to completing everyday work tasks. Most participants found that working from home did not increase their overall productivity or job satisfaction, and few participants felt lonely or isolated when working from home. Overall, the negative aspects and benefits seemed to balance out in a series of trade-offs. The majority of participants would want to work from home again or at least be given the option to work from home part-time or on a hybrid schedule. Recommendations for further research include (1) performing quantitative research to develop scales of productivity and employee satisfaction when working from home, (2) determining how participants’ responses would have been different if they had not been dealing with a pandemic, (3) interviewing the same participants from this study who were still working from home in the future to determine if their feelings about the experience changed, (4) asking more in-depth questions on whether the supervisors’ style changed to accommodate the circumstances of working from home, (5) pursuing questions on worker engagement that were not asked in this study, (6) interviewing more males for the study to see if their responses showed a trend that was different from the female responses

Increased mental health difficulties were reported in Canadian children as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the pandemic has impacted families as well. The purpose of this thesis was: 1) to examine fluctuations in children’s mental health symptoms and mindful parenting across the 2020-2021 academic year; 2) to examine whether children’s symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity at the beginning of the 2020-2021 academic year were associated with mindful parenting at the end of the academic year; 3) to examine whether children’s depressive and anxiety symptoms at the end of the year moderated this relationship and; 4) to examine how child age and gender affected these relationships. Parents of 114 young children in a large Canadian city participated in this study in the Fall of 2020 and the Spring of 2021. Parents completed several self-report scales used to measure children’s mental health symptomatology and mindfulness in parenting. While there were no significant changes in children’s mental health symptoms or mindful parenting across the time points, children’s symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity were significantly, negatively associated with mindful parenting across the pandemic year, and children’s depressive symptoms moderated this relationship. Specifically, when children’s depressive symptoms were low or average it was found that higher symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity were associated with lower levels of mindful parenting among parents of young girls. Results may inform practitioners about which families require additional support during the pandemic and beyond.

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused immense challenges to businesses and people’s lives. For the pharmaceutical industry, these challenges entail changes in demand, supply chain, consumption trends, as well as a shift towards telemedicine and changes in R&D priorities. To respond to these market changes, firms must reallocate their resources and modify their processes, which requires an agility in the firms’ structure and management practices.The aim of this work was to identify how firms can manage their operations resources and processes to adapt to sudden market change and facilitate crisis-driven digital transformation. The objective is to investigate how firms’ operations strategy and organizational attributes affect firm performance under the changing market conditions during the recent pandemic. To do this, we analyzed the operations strategy of 13 large (more than 250 employees) pharmaceutical firms in Sweden qualitatively. Using the operations strategy matrix as a guiding tool, keywords describing the decision areas and performance objectives of these firm were used for searching online published information. By reviewing annual reports, press releases and articles in trade journals, information on firms’ strategic priorities was extracted. By the use of pattern matching, the relation between firms’ strategic preferences and their ability to adapt to market changes was established. Moreover, we analyzed the relation between pharmaceutical firms’ financial performance, their organization attributes (i.e., span of control, financial resources and intellectual resources) and crisis conditions quantitatively. For this purpose, OLS regression and panel (data) analysis was used to identify significant variables that impact performance of 239 registered firms in Sweden.We found that firms focusing on market competitiveness and growth orientation in their operations strategy showed better performance during the pandemic in comparison to firms focusing only on market competitiveness. It was also noted that it takes time to see the effects of changes in strategic priorities and depends on firms’ existing agility. However, the relation between firms’ performance during the pandemic and their status within the organization and ownership structure was unclear. It was also observed that ownership structure and firms’ status within the organization had no impact on the choice of perspective on operations strategy.Similarly, organizational attributes in terms of firms’ financial resources were found to have a positive impact on financial performance, and this relation was more prominent for firms with a wide span of control (horizontal structure) than for firms with a narrow span of control (vertical structure). While a negative relation between crisis conditions and financial performance was observed for firms with a narrow span of control, no such relationship could be observed for firms with a wide span of control. Similarly, no relation between firms’ intellectual resources and their financial performance was found in this study.This work provides evidence on how firms’ operations strategy and organizational attributes affect performance, particularly during COVID-19 pandemic-driven market changes. The findings provided in this work are relevant considering that the business environment is currently changing at an increasing pace. Additionally, the increased use of artificial intelligence, big data, the internet of things, and the platform economy has led us to a new industrial revolution, in which firms with efficient use of resources and processes are endowed with increased survival chances. The results of this thesis can provide insight into how organizations can optimize their resource usage and processes to achieve organizational agility for sustainable competitive advantages during future market changes.

Context: During an influx of users during a short period of time there will most likely be more issues reported and discovered. This will lead to more work for the software developer team. Will this affect the development of the software and, if so, how?Objectives: Research how the large amount of new users Zoom received during the start of the covid-19 pandemic affects the development of new features, changes to old features, bug/issue resolving and scheduled updates/maintenance.Realization (Method): We are using case studies as our empirical method. We are looking through and analyzing the incident logs and release notes that are provided by Zoom. With the help of the acquired data we can make observations and compare them to find connections between the increase in user base and issues found/features released. Results: With the data we extracted from Zoom’s incident logs and release notes, we could conclude that the influx of new users increased the number of bugs/issues found.Scheduled updates and maintenance saw a decline as the covid outbreak continued.The total number of features added/changed were not diminished, but instead increased. Conclusions: From the results we conclude that an increased user base leads to more issues and the need to implement new un-scheduled features to improve scalability, which induced a lower focus on scheduled maintenance/updates.

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked rapid shifts to engineering education, causing changes to course formats and student experiences. The culture of undergraduate engineering programs undoubtably affected this transition online and affected how students interpreted their experiences. To date, research on engineering culture has explored the values, beliefs, and underlying ideologies of the culture. However, what we know about engineering culture was captured predominantly during periods of stability. Because COVID-19 provides an opportunity to either challenge or uphold aspects of engineering culture, it was imperative to capture the experiences of students undergoing an engineering education during this time. In order to understand what facets of engineering culture were salient in students' interpretations of their classroom experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, I conducted a multiple case study exploring mechanical engineering students' constructions of their experiences taking second and third year courses during the pandemic. I compared two mechanical engineering programs – one in the United States and one in South Africa – by conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 to 11 mechanical engineering undergraduate students at each site as well as 1 to 2 key informants. My analysis identified the following cultural features that emerged as salient from students' perspectives during the pandemic at both sites: intrinsic hardness, differential access to resources, and application and design. Additionally, my analysis identified the following cultural features that emerged as salient at only one site: seeking help, job market, and scientific way of thinking. The key difference between sites appeared with respect to differential access to resources. This study captures and reports critical data about students' constructions of their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. By investigating engineering culture during a time of stress, this research identifies the most salient features of engineering culture that remained constant through the pandemic as well as the features that changed due to the pandemic. Further, the global comparative aspect of this work highlights which features of engineering culture are universal and which are influenced by national context. Overall, this research aims to inform future educational responses to disasters as well as future change efforts in engineering. / Doctor of Philosophy / The COVID-19 pandemic sparked rapid shifts to engineering education, sending students home and shifting classes online. The beliefs and values that engineering instructors and students have about how engineering should be taught and learned impacted this shift online in ways that could either help or hinder student learning. The pandemic provides an opportunity to understand which beliefs and values in engineering were stickiest and the most important to how students described their experiences. In order to understand how students described their experiences taking classes online during the pandemic, I interviewed 10 to 11 mechanical engineering students at two universities – one university in the United States and one in South Africa. I asked students to share stories about taking classes during the pandemic. I then analyzed their responses and looked for commonalities across their stories. I found that students talked about six common features of their experiences. First, students felt like their classes were hard, and they felt their classes should have been hard because that was part of what it means to study engineering. Second, students noticed that having a laptop and Wi-Fi became very important when all teaching and learning was happening online, and not having that access made learning more challenging. Third, students missed their in-person laboratory classes, which they also saw as central to engineering. Fourth, students at the university in South Africa talked about challenges with getting help with their classes because virtual learning made accessing instructor and peer help more difficult. Fifth, students at the university in the United States had concerns about finding jobs because the pandemic was impacting the economy and their ability to obtain internships. Sixth, students at the university in the United States were frustrated that the response to the pandemic wasn't more rooted in science. This study captures and reports students' stories about their experiences during the pandemic. By looking at how students talked about their experiences during the pandemic, this research identifies the stickiest features of engineering culture that remained constant through the pandemic as well as the features that changed due to the pandemic. Further, by comparing two countries, this work highlights which beliefs and values in engineering are widespread and which are not. Overall, this research aims to inform future educational responses to disasters as well as future change efforts in engineering.

This dissertation consists of three essays in Health Economics relating to the recent challenges in the U.S. The first essay studies the impact of retirement on subsequent health and investigates the mediation effect of social network in the relationship between retirement and health. Findings reveal that retirement adversely impacts physical and mental health outcomes and a considerable portion of these effects are explained by social network changes post-retirement. In particular, shrinkage in the size of social network post-retirement deteriorates physical health and increases depression in retirees. In the second essay, we assess the differential effect of social distancing on the daily growth rate of COVID-19 infections in the US counties by considering the spatial pattern of COVID-19 spread. We also conduct a comparative analysis of the effect on urban versus rural counties, as well as low versus high socially vulnerable counties. Our analysis illustrates that a high level of social distancing compliance is needed in urban counties and in socially vulnerable areas to achieve the largest impact at curve flattening, whereas moderate-compliance is enough in reaching the peak marginal impact in rural regions and counties with low social vulnerability. In the third essay, by combining multiple data sources, we investigate how racial disparities in access to healthcare contribute to the disparity in COVID-19 infections and mortality in black versus white sub-groups. The multilevel analysis demonstrates that a higher probability of having health insurance significantly reduces disparity in COVID-19 mortality in black sub-group while it has no impact on the disparity in whites. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation uses various quantitative methods to investigate policy-relevant questions regarding the recent challenges in the U.S. economy. In the first chapter, we explore how the physical and mental health of individuals changes by retirement. The results show that retirement decreases physical health while increases depression and anxiety. We also analyze how social network changes after retirement might cause changes in the health of retirees. We find that retirees may experience worse physical and mental health than non-retirees due to losing some of their relationships after retirement. In particular, the loss of contacts increases depression and deteriorates general health. In the second chapter, we investigate how compliance with social distancing within a typical county and its neighbor counties can reduce the spread of COVID-19. We examine this question for urban versus rural counties in the US and socially vulnerable versus socially not vulnerable counties. We find a high compliance level of social distancing is needed in urban counties and in socially vulnerable areas to reach the highest impact at slowing down the COVID-19 virus spread. In the third chapter, we examine whether healthcare access inequalities (e.g., having health insurance) increase the risk of COVID-19 infections and mortality for black communities. Our results show that having health insurance decreases COVID-19 mortality in communities of color but not whites.

SARS-CoV-2 is caused by a pathogenic and highly transmissible beta coronavirus leading to severe infections in immuno-compromised individuals. This study first evaluates the primers used in the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) to detect SARS-CoV-2 by understanding how mutations might affect the primer efficiency with the SARS-CoV-2 sequences. Mutations on the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 are the most important as the spike protein mediates the viral entry into host cells. This study tracks the course of mutations on the spike protein by focusing on the haplogroups of the sequences across the world. A comprehensive database linking three important, currently available databases is curated as part of this study to fill the gaps caused by sequencing errors. Further, this study exploits the data generated by the Illumina and Oxford Nanopore next generation sequencing methods to study the evolution of mutations in a single Septuagenarian patient over an infection period of 102 days using the gene analysis software Geneious Prime. / Master of Science / A novel corona virus named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has taken down the entire world by causing Covid-19 pandemic. Initially detected in Wuhan, China, the virus has now made its way to more than 200 countries with a heavy death toll. Understanding the virus through mutation tracking and improving diagnostics and vaccine design have now become the top priority of researchers. Most of these researchers depend on quality viral sequence datasets to identify and track mutations. One aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive dataset linking the GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), NCBI (National Center for Biological Information) and the SRA (Sequence Read Archive) sequences. The dataset can be used for genome analysis and mutation tracking which can provide important insights for vaccine design and in improving diagnostic assays. In addition, this study provides an analysis of viral mutations in in the genomic regions targeted by commonly used primers in the RT-PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 that may affect the efficiency of detection. This study also uses the haplogroup information of people across the world to track the D614G mutation on the S gene of SARS-CoV-2 as it may be associated with increased transmissibility. To track the course of mutations in SARS-CoV-2, it is important to analyze the sequencing data provided by the Illumina and Oxford Nanopore next generation sequencing methods. We present a case study to investigate the course of SARS-CoV-2 mutations in a single septuagenarian patient over a period of 102days using the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) data generated by two Next Generation Sequencing methods and compare the advantages that one has over the other.

This dissertation is comprised of two manuscripts that explore various contestations and representations of knowledge about the highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1virus. In the first manuscript, I explore three narratives that have been produced to describe the 20-year journey of the virus. The journey begins in 1996 when the virus was a singular localized animal virus but then over the next 20 years multiplied its ontological status through a (de)stabilized global network of science and politics that promoted both fears of contagion and politics of otherness. Written by and for powerful actors and institutions in the global North, the narratives focused on technical solutions and outbreak fears. In doing so, the narratives produced policies and practices of biopower that obscured alternative considerations for equity, social justice, and wellbeing for the marginalized groups most directly affected by the H5N1 virus. The second manuscript explores a unique aspect of the H5N1 virus's journey as an emerging infectious disease -- its representation as a potential weapon for bioterrorists. The US government's recent attempt to secure what constitutes H5N1 knowledge produced a global debate between scientists and policy makers over how to balance the nation-state's desire for security with the life science's tradition of openly shared research. Known as the dual-use dilemma, this debate set up binaries of impossible reconciliation between the two groups. This dissertation argues that the dual-use dilemma obscures larger questions of justice. I propose a new concept of justice, knowledge justice, as an alternate more globally inclusive framework for exploring ways out of the dilemma. The concept is premised on the assertion that if knowledge is framed to obscure justice issues, then the justice questions of owning that knowledge can be used as a way out of the dual-use dilemma. Thus, knowledge becomes a question of justice that should be as important to policy makers as more traditional justice considerations of inequities in distribution, recognition, representation, and fairness. / Ph. D.