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In terms of scale, shock, and disenfranchisement, the disruption to formal education arising from COVID-19 has been unprecedented. Anecdotally, responses from teachers and educators around the world range from heightened caution to being inspired by distance education as the "new normal." Of all the challenges, face-to-face and formal teaching have been most heavily affected. Despite some education systems demonstrating resilience, a major challenge is sustaining quality and inclusiveness in formal education suddenly delivered at a distance. In probing these issues, this article profiles international perspectives on the role of open education in responding to the impact on formal school and higher education caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We proceed by highlighting and analysing practices and case studies from 13 countries representing all global regions, identifying and discussing the challenges and opportunities that have presented themselves. Reports cover the period from the beginning of 2020 until 11 March 2021, the first anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak as declared by the World Health Organization. In our comparative study, we identify seven key aspects of which three (missing infrastructure and sharing OER, open education and access to OER, and urgent need for professional development and training for teachers) are directly related to open education at a distance. After comparing examples of existing practice, we make recommendations and offer insights into how open education strategies can lead to interventions that are effective and innovative--to improve formal education at a distance in schools and universities in the future.

The aim of this study was to determine whether depression can explain the negative relationship between academic performance and the belief that intelligence is a fixed trait, i.e., entity belief. A sample of 353 French volunteer adolescents (age 11-16) completed questionnaires assessing entity theory and depressive symptoms (Children Depression Inventory: CDI). Academic performance was assessed by math performance while controlling for baseline level of math ability. Results of this study revealed that entity theory is a significant negative predictor of academic performance and a significant positive predictor of depression. Importantly, our findings also show that depression plays a significant mediating role between entity theory and academic performance. Our findings indicate that individuals who consider their abilities to be non-malleable are more likely to develop depressive symptoms which, in turn, decrease academic performance. These findings contribute to tailoring specific prevention and treatment programs for childhood and adolescent depression.

The adaptive threat-detection advantage takes the form of a preferential orienting of attention to threatening scenes. In this study, we compared attention to social scenes in 15 high-functioning individuals with autism (ASD) and matched typically developing (TD) individuals. Eye-tracking was recorded while participants were presented with pairs of scenes, either emotional positive-neutral, emotional negative-neutral or neutral-neutral scenes. Early allocation of attention, the first image fixated in each pair, differed between groups: contrary to TD individuals who showed the typical threat-detection advantage towards negative images, the ASD group failed to show a bias toward threat-related scenes. Later processing of stimuli, indicated by the total fixation to the images during the 3-s presentation, was found unaffected in the ASD group. These results support the hypothesis of an early atypical allocation of attention towards natural social scenes in ASD, that is compensated in later stages of visual processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]