The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life and all forms of education. However, the impact on medical education is unique since the need for continuity of training medical students is urgent and traditionally calls for hands-on training and a physical presence. This is further compounded by the unavailability of teachers who are also serving as frontline health-care providers in the pandemic. This article discusses the role and types of information communication technology (ICT) tools in filling the gaps and ensuring educational continuity in medical education, collaboration, and learning, across the world in the current scenario. A variety of online collaboration tools and digital interventions are discussed. A comparison between the various ICT tools being used by medical educators is also presented. The potential and corresponding challenges of revamping the medical education system and incorporating ICT tools in the long run have also been discussed. Our work can serve as the basis of further studies on creating digital educational models in medical education.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns to contain it are affecting the daily life of people around the world. People are now using digital technologies, including social media, more than ever before. The objectives of this study were to analyze the social media usage pattern of people during the COVID-19 imposed lockdown and to understand the effects of emotion on the same. We scraped messages posted on Twitter by users from India expressing their emotion or view on the pandemic during the first 40 days of the lockdown. We identified the users who posted frequently and analyzed their usage pattern and their overall emotion during the study period based on their tweets. It was observed that 222 users tweeted frequently during the study period. Out of them, 13.5% were found to be addicted to Twitter and posted 13.67 tweets daily on an average (SD: 4.89), while 3.2% were found to be highly addicted and posted 40.71 tweets daily on an average (SD: 9.90) during the study period. The overall emotion of 40.1% of the users was happiness throughout the study period. However, it was also observed that users who tweeted more frequently were typically angry, disgusted, or sad about the prevailing situation. We concluded that people with a negative sentiment are more susceptible to addictive use of social media.

Courses on computer programming are included in the curricula of almost all engineering disciplines. We surveyed the research literature and identified the techniques that are commonly used by instructors for teaching these courses. We observed that visual programming and game-based learning can enhance computational thinking and problem-solving skills in students and may be used to introduce them to programming. Robot programming may be used to attract students to programming, but the success of this technique is subjected to the availability of robots. Pair and collaborative programming allows students to learn from one another and write efficient programs. Assessment systems help instructors in evaluating programs written by students and provide them with timely feedback. Furthermore, an analysis of citations showed that Scratch is the most researched tool for teaching programming. We discuss how these techniques may be used to teach introductory courses, advanced courses, and massive open online courses on programming.

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Kane’s [Phys. Rev. 131, 79 (1963)] model for the density of states for energies in the band gap is in qualitative agreement with experiment. Halperin and Lax [Phys. Rev. 148, 722 (1966)] have also suggested a model for band tailing, which is applicable to the deep tailing states. In the present study, theoretical models have been proposed for the band tailing in the case of heavily doped semiconductors that are more general than those of Kane and others. In addition, the present study also offers an E-k̄ dispersion relation for band tails in the parabolic band based on Kane’s semiclassical theory. This study has helped us to obtain a different model for the density of states in the band-tailing conditions and the model is expected to agree better with experiment.

A green synthesis method using Azadirachta Indica leaf extract has been used to synthesized ZnO nanostructures. TEM image confirmed the formation of nanoparticles of size in the range of ∼50–100 nm. The stochiometry was also confirmed from the EDX spectroscopy. The structural analysis of the synthesized material was performed using the x-ray diffraction (XRD) data. The ZnO nanocrystals exhibit wurtzite unit cell structure as revealed from the XRD pattern. The calculation of lattice parameters shows that the distortion in the structure is very small. The material is highly crystalline with crystallite size of 20.05 nm and microstrain of 5.926 × 10−4. In this context crystallinity index is also calculated. The growth of the crystal is anisotropic as observed from the intensity of the diffraction and was quantified through the parameter degree of orientation. The synthesized ZnO nanostructure has large specific surface area. Other crystal parameters like Zn–O bond length, u-parameter, crystal volume were also calculated form the XRD pattern and show the structural perfection of the grown nanocrystal with a good figure of merit. Raman-shift measurements showed the existence of various phonon vibrational modes of the ZnO lattice. The material being synthesized by green approach is non-toxic in nature and may have potential applications in nanomaterials based medicinal and therapeutic applications.