Abstract
Objectives: During the pandemic, quarantine has led to the lockdown of many physical educational institutions. Thus, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become a more common choice for participants. MOOCs are often flagged as supplemental methods to educational disparities caused by regional socioeconomic distribution. However, dissenters argue that MOOCs can exacerbate the digital divide. This study aimed to compare the participants' performance before and after the outbreak of COVID-19, analyze the impact of the epidemic on online education of cosmetic dermatology from the view of the regional socioeconomic distribution, and investigate whether MOOCs exacerbate the digital divide in the COVID-19 epidemic.Methods: The study was conducted in participants of the MOOC course Appreciation and Analysis of Cosmetics from January 2018 to December 2020. Based on the platform data and official socioeconomic statistics, correlation of multivariate analysis was used to determine the factors related to the number of total participants. A panel regression model and stepwise least squares regression analysis (STEPLS) were employed to further analyze the relationship between GDP, population, number of college students and number of total participants in different years in the eastern, central and western regions of China.Results: The number of total participants in 2020 surged 82.02% compared with that in 2019. Completion rates were generally stable in 2018 and 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic and significantly decreased in 2020 after the outbreak of the pandemic. GDP was the most important socioeconomic factor that determined the total number of participants and it was positively related to the total number of participants before and after the outbreak of the pandemic. The number of college students was unrelated to the total number of participants before the epidemic, and after the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, the number became positively related in all regions of China.Conclusions: This study shows that the epidemic pushes more people to choose MOOCs to study cosmetic dermatology, and online education could exacerbate rather than reduce disparities that are related to regional and socioeconomic status in the cosmetic field in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Highlights
COVID-19 is both highly contagious and transmissible
The results revealed that gross domestic product (GDP) was positively related to the number of participants in the whole region, no matter before (2018 and 2019) or after (2020) the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was consistent with the Pearson correlation test results
This study showed that the number of individuals enrolled in the cosmetic dermatology online course almost doubled after the outbreak of COVID-19
Summary
COVID-19 is both highly contagious and transmissible. As the world is in an age of widespread global trade and travel, it causes the means for a rapid spread in the disease regardless of national borders. Being in quarantine is often an unpleasant experience and leads to negative emotions, including posttraumatic stress symptoms, confusion, anxiety and anger [3,4,5]. During this period, it is a good choice to study independently by networking to eliminate negative feelings. With the closure of all campuses, 22 online course platforms, including MOOCs (massive open online courses), Wisdom Tree and xuetangX, were organized to develop and diversify a distance-learning solution by February 2, 2020, with over 24,000 online courses and 401 national virtual simulationbased courses available for universities to choose from [7, 8]. Online education faces the problem of an unprecedented large scale
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