To curb the COVID-19 outbreak Malaysian Government enforced movement control. As a result many private schools with an ongoing term shifted to remote teaching. This phenomenological case study explored some issues which were faced by parents and learners of primary level students during synchronous teaching. Observation was carried out for a period of 13 days on 2 primary school students of a private international school of Malaysia. Observation was followed by interviews with the same participants, where their views and reflections regarding synchronous teaching were recorded. This data was further supplemented with brief interviews with parents, whose children were also in the primary level of the same school. Nvivo 12 was used for analysis. Following Saldana's coding (2016), elemental coding methods were used, employing structural, descriptive, and in vivo coding. 62 nodes emerged during the first cycle coding process which were placed under 10 categories in the final analysis process. Results showed that parents' continuous supervision and guidance was needed in addition to the teacher's mentoring and direction when teaching online. Furthermore, data showed that one of the problems in remote teaching is lack of developing social skills of the learners as they cannot interact with their classmates in 'real-time'. Synchronous teaching increases learners' screen time which was not liked by parents. Interviews revealed that students also preferred in-class, face-to-face learning over synchronous learning. Though importance of remote teaching in this hour of crisis cannot be denied, this study concludes that implementing 100% online teaching for primary students is still at its rudimentary phase of effectiveness. This research holds high significance in opening up new perspective for educators and policy makers on how to effectively plan for online teaching in future.
The purpose of the study is to explore the shadow economy of violent extremism through charity lenses and factors associated with misuse of charitable giving in a global financial system. It reviews the emergency response situations like COVID-19 when financial needs are urgent with lacked monitoring and control over payment disbursement to vulnerable groups. It highlights several governments' significant steps to counter the illicit finance flow through 'public-face' charity organizations. Descriptive research was used to gather secondary data insights using published reports, articles, news portals, and policy briefs from renowned institutions. The findings depict four factors known as economic and capacity, socio-cultural, politico-legal, and global networks support in misuse of charitable giving to finance violent extremism. This study claims not all charitable giving misused for extremism and violence. However, there is a possibility that extremist groups could take advantage of using humanitarian organizations' face to finance violent extremism. Two possible recommendations have been made to overcome this issue by adopting digital payment mechanisms and community engagement to design and deliver the COVID-19 response recovery programs.
With the rapid global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from diverse fields of study have contributed markedly in different research aspects. Considering the substantial economic significance of the pandemic at the micro and macro level throughout the world, we review the scientific publications in the discipline of Economics. To draw a broad inference, we analyze a total of 1,636 scientific publications starting from 1974, which covers the period of earlier pandemics or epidemics that have a close association with COVID-19 using bibliometric analysis. Our analysis and mapping reveal key information related to the contributors at different levels, including author, institution, country, and publication sources. Besides, we identify the historical concentration of research using scientific clustering and illustrate transformations at different times. Moreover, recognizing the underlying inadequacy of economics research, we propose several areas of future research. Our findings and suggestions are expected to act as a roadmap to potential research opportunities and notable implications for business and policymakers.