When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, schools around the globe had to switch from regular, in-person classes to online learning overnight. This introduced numerous operational challenges, particularly in equipping students with quantitative skills essential for the labor market.

New research from the University of Notre Dame looks at how the abrupt move from classroom teaching to online learning during the lockdown affected college students’ performance in China.

Surprisingly, the undergraduates performed better in math after switching to online classes — improving their scores by about eight to 11 points on a 100-point scale, according to Shijie Lu, the Howard J. and Geraldine F. Korth Associate Professor of Marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. Lu’s research, “Effectiveness of Online Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Chinese Universities,” is forthcoming in Production and Operations Management.

Along with Xintong Han from Laval University in Quebec City, Shane Wang from Virginia Tech and Nan Cui at Wuhan University in China, Lu analyzed more than 15,000 course records from nearly 8,000 students across nine universities. They compared students’ grades from before the pandemic, when they learned in person, to those during the lockdown when all classes moved online.

Results varied depending on the subject and the lockdown environment. Online learning worked especially well for reasoning-based subjects such as mathematics, where students could pause lectures, rewatch examples and practice problems at their own pace. In contrast, courses such as English that rely on discussion and interpretation, and are challenging to replicate effectively in virtual environments, benefited much less from the online format.

“Contrary to the widespread belief that online education is less effective than face-to-face instruction, our findings show that students actually performed better online, at least in quantitative subjects during the pandemic,” said Lu, who specializes in business analytics and digital marketing. “This challenges the traditional view that in-person learning is always superior and suggests that, under certain conditions, well-structured online environments can enhance learning outcomes.”

Results were linked to the strictness of stay-at-home orders or transportation bans to see how different types of governmental lockdown policies shaped learning outcomes. Using rigorous econometric methods, the researchers made sure that the improvements they observed were due to the switch to online learning and not other unrelated factors.

They found that stricter stay-at-home orders issued by the government raised psychological stress and reduced the effectiveness of online learning. However, these negative effects were partially offset when workplace closures and public transportation suspensions helped some people maintain focus and discipline.

One possible explanation is that as parents were more frequently home due to employment interruptions, they were better positioned to ensure their children attended virtual classes, remained focused on tasks and followed a structured schedule. Meanwhile, suspension of public transportation reduced opportunities for social outings and non-academic distractions, effectively creating a quieter, more focused study environment at home.

“Our results show that online education when done thoughtfully can be more than just a backup plan during emergencies,” Lu said. “It can be an effective tool for learning, especially in analytical subjects.”

For educators, this means designing online courses that take advantage of digital tools — such as interactive exercises or on-demand videos — rather than simply moving lectures onto Zoom. For policymakers, it highlights that not all lockdown policies have the same effect on educational outcomes. Strict stay-at-home orders hurt learning, but moderate workplace closures that allow parents to supervise their children help to improve outcomes.

“These insights can help schools and governments better prepare for future disruptions — whether from pandemics, natural disasters or other emergencies — by understanding how to balance safety and learning effectiveness,” Lu said.

The study shows that online learning programs need to be flexible and designed with the specific course material and students’ physical location in mind.

Contact: Shijie Lu, 574-631-5883, slyu@nd.edu

When covid first emerged into our consciousness at the start of 2020 information was limited, guess work was rife but educated guesswork was the best we had. Then the data started coming in, small scale with many factors and variables to consider. Calculating fatality rate, incubation time, infectiousness, hospitalisation rate, proportion of asymptomatic cases etc, became vital in predicting the trajectory of the pandemic and what measures were needed. January featured fear and disbelief, February proved covid couldn’t simply be ignored, March was when governments realised the hospitalisation rate could overwhelm healthcare.

But as the science got clearer, disinformation and the development of an alternative narrative became more coordinated, the media platformed these contrarian voices with false equivilence and created a space for conspiracy theories to thrive. Its important to understand that there was a coordinated campaign to undermine public health in the midst of a pandemic even when the bodies were piling high in January 2021, and it has led to antivax sentiment becoming a fixture of the radical right.

In the US a group of academics had emerged as the media's choice of anti-lockdown expert with many holding positions at top universities, this group included John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Scott Atlas, Michael Levitt and Joseph Ladapo.

Toby Young announced the founding of Lockdown Sceptics (now Daily Sceptic) at the start of the UK lockdown having argued that letting up to 250,000 vulnerable people die from covid was a price worth paying to protect the economy. Lockdown Sceptics became a media hub for alternative experts and was thanked by the AIER in their defence of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Besides Young, Lockdown Sceptics directors were Noah Carl, who along with Young wrote for the Thiel funded Quillette.

Luke Johnson is a businessman who donated to several other anti-lockdown initiatives and is also a director of Toby Young's Free Speech Union that was founded with the support of Thiel.

Will Jones, a conservative Angligan Reverant who would later join the antivax HART group.

The hub of alternative experts, Pandata was founded in April 2020 by Nick Hudson. In 2021 I received a leaked copy of Pandata's membership database and work streams. The membership read like a whose who of disseminators of covid disinformation and conspiracy theories from around the world. Hudson and Pandata chair Jonathan Engler now claim they believe there was no pandemic. Scott Atlas and Paul E Alexander were both members of the advisory board while working for the first Trump administration. The GBD authors Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Gupta, and Peter McCullough were also members.

The legal challenge against lockdown by Keep Britain Free was represented by Francis Hoar who was a Pandata member. In 2021 Toby Young, Luke Johnson and Will Jones were speakers at a Pandata event.

The Council for National Policy (CNP) has operated as the hub for the US radical right since its founding in 1980. It’s a coalition of what has become Christian Nationalism, raw resource industrialists, financiers and the newer addition of tech-bro oligarchs, and has been a driving force behind the culture wars. Billionaires such as Koch, Thiel, and the Mercers are involved.

A leaked recording of a CNP meeting at the start of May 2020 revealed a plan to create an organisation of “doctors for Trump” who would argue against covid restrictions. The CNP were worried that unless the economy was fully reopened soon then Trumps chances of re-election would be severely harmed, many members also had personal financial interests that were being impacted. For instance furlough and working from home had a dramatic global impact on oil demand; Rotterdam dam port, the largest in Europe had queues of oil tankers.

The CNP recruited from members of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) and America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD) was born, led by Simone Gold who would end up in prison for participating in the storming of Capitol Hill on Jan 6th.

An already established offshoot of the AAPS is the Truth For Health Foundation led by AAPS members Elizabeth Lee Vliet and Peter McCullough, who became a key character in the covid disinformation ecosystem leading to the Trump 2.0 relying on him as an expert to justify RFK Jr’s attacks on vaccines.

For the sake of clarity these network maps are simplified.

In May the UK group UsForThem was founded by Molly Kingsley with the help of Allison Pearson of the Telegraph, their campaign was against all measures in schools, with Kingsley saying we “should allow children the benefit of natural immunity” ie let the kids gets infected. Somehow this supposedly grassroots group had almost immediately gained the support of Ed Barker, the PR guy for the Legatum think tank of Christopher Chandler co-ownerof GBNews, several factional groups like Conservative Way Forward, he ran PR for multiple senior Conservative MPs, Boris Johnson’s campaign for Conservative leader and Leave Means Leave.

UsForThem launched via the Telegraph and then appeared across the media. They also had the support of Ellen Townsend, who was named as being on Pandata's advisory board in September 2020, and UsForThem’s Ros Jones (a fan of disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield) worked with Pandata and many anti-vax organisations and initiatives. Kingsley became a hero of the anti-lockdown and then the antivax community, in her book she gave her thanks to many stalwarts of the Covid disinformation ecosystem including Bhattacharya who she describes as a friend.

The Free Speech Union (FSU) was founded in February 2020, and has fought against measures to tackle misinformation. Luke Johnson is a director and Allison Pearson sits on the FSU board.

The same handful of anti-lockdown voices were constantly across the UK media in 2020 included Karol Sikora and Carl Heneghan. Sikora ran a private health company and had a history of campaigning against the NHS, even appearing in a Republican advert against publicly funded healthcare. Sikora was named on Pandata's advisory board in September 2020.

Heneghan and his academic partner Jefferson were commissioned by John Conly to produce systematic reviews that concluded that aerosols were not a significant mode of covid transmission (they are). Conly was at the centre of a cover up of airborne transmission inside the WHO. Heneghan leads the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University and for a while it was officially listed as a partner organisation to Pandata.

I have also added in Peter Thiel, the pandemic proved particularly profitable for his Palantir company. Palantir offered to create digital dashboards for governments for the nominal cost of £1 or €1, many governments took up the offer allowing the health data for entire countries to be fed into Palantir's platform. Since then Palantir has been able allowed to embed itself into many healthcare systems with dozens of contracts just in the UK. In the US it was a Thiel company that created the data hub used by Emily Oster to claim that covid wasn’t impacting schools and children.

Thiel is also an old friend of Bhattacharya since their students days at Stanford when they were college buddies.

We can see how Toby Young, Allison Pearson and Ed Barker are integral to the development of an organised anti-lockdown movement. The covid inquiry revealed how right wing media editors were lobbying Boris Johnson hard behind closed doors and between them. Young had Lockdown Sceptics, Pearson via the Telegraph launched the Planet Normal podcast that exclusively platformed lockdown sceptics, and Barker marshalled political support, the CRG MPs had a large overlap with the Brexit ultras’ European Research Group of MPs with many ties to the US right.

Pandata's role as a central hub making ties in the UK can already be seen. In 2022 Pandata claimed to have links to over 40 countries, and many members were involved with multiple groups in their own countries. Fully covering the links of Pandata members requires a spreadsheet not a diagram, just starting to try covering the basics of mainly the UK turned into this.

Another character of note is Patrick Fagan, former lead psychologist for Cambridge Analytica, the election influencing company at the centre of the illegal data harvesting scandal on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016. MAGA strategist and CNP member Steve Bannon led the company, the Mercers funded it and Thiel’s Palantir provided support.

Patrick Fagan was also part of Pandata's data team.

In August 2020 Covid19Assembly was established in the UK and registered with Companies House under David Fleming's name. This is one of around a dozen companies under Fleming's name that has been dissolved without ever filing a financial account. Covid19Assembly's initial aim was to run a campaign against the official death statistics, they collected donations to run a death audit to review every covid death certificate which they claimed would show deaths had greatly been exaggerated, a foundational pillar of covid conspiracies. The audit had no legal powers and was to be conducted by Clare Craig, a Pandata member and a leading UK figure in the covid disinformation ecosystem. In fact most of those involved in Covid19Assembly were Pandata members: Patrick Fagan, Martin Kulldorff, Roger Hodkinson and Francis Hoar. Toby Young and Ros Jones was also a member.

Removing a few nodes to stop it getting too messy.

Removing CNP, AAPS, Peter Thiel, Quillette, Noah Carl, Cambridge Analytica, Karol Sikora and Scott Atlas.

Every element of the pandemic response came under attack from this astroturfing campaign. Next up PCRclaims, which built on the work of the likes of Heneghan claiming rising covid cases in the late summer of 2020 were an artefact of false positives. Another popular voice in the media in 2020, Michael Yeadon was introduced as an ex-Pfizer chief, Yeadon was a key voice in questioning the reliability of PCR testing and quickly descended into conspiracy theory. The HARTleaks show that by the start of 2021 he was ranting in private chats about global conspiracies to depopulate the world. Yeadon was a member of many groups including PCRclaims, Pandata, Truth For Health, Doctors for Covid Ethics, and Liberal Spring. In mid 2021 Yeadown and fellow Pandata/HART member Joel Smalley had taken up roles as advisors to America’s Frontline Doctors.

Other PCRclaims members: Patrick Fagan, Clare Craig, Ellen Townsend and Anna Raynor.

A web with Pandata in the centre with the campaign groups sprouting off of it. This is of course just a selection of UK based groups, the same was occurring across the western world, however the infrastructure to wage culture wars was more developed in the UK than in most of Europe. In the US, the powers for implementing covid measures mainly sat at state level requiring considerable resources to wage a culture war, but in the UK all it takes is a relatively small group with strong media and political connections.

At the start of October there was the Great Barrington Declaration, authors Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are on the map, Sunetra Gupta is also a member of Pandata and a director of Collateral Global. The GBD was a focus point to rally behind for the entire covid disinformation ecosystem that had been established in just over half a year.

November saw Collateral Global established in the UK in the name of Gupta's partner Alex Caccia as a continuation of the GBD. Luke Johnson donated to the start up of CG a did the “dark money ATM” the Donors Trust, but the bulk of their funding comes from foundations such as the Von Opels and the King of Belgium’s Foundation. Bhattacharya donated a $250,000 award from the US right wing Bradley Foundation to Collateral Global.

Every aspect of the pandemic was targetted by this network. Heneghan's work undermined airborne transmission and masks, UsForThem focused on keeping schools free from mitigations, Covid19Assembly claimed the death toll was greatly exaggerated, PCR Claims questioning testing cast doubts on infection rates and deaths. Collateral Global produced pseudo-academic papers to reinforce these narratives. The Free Speech Union fought against efforts to counter disinformation and misinformation, Francis Hoar and a group of other lawyers; Law or Fiction, Lawyers for Liberty, Steve Jackson launched legal challenges against the government and drafted template legal warning letters for public bodies, hospitals and schools.

All of this garnered media attention, often on the front pages of right wing newspapers in articles written by journalists who were supporters of these groups. The CRG MPs comments on points raised by the campaign groups would then generate a second round of articles.

And the main initial target for the UK section of the ecosystem was Boris Johnson who was meeting privately with newspaper owners and editors. Enough doubt was put into Johnson's mind that he dithered and delayed when cases began to rise, leading to a private meeting with Heneghan, Gupta and Sweden's Anders Tegnell in September before he chose to ignore his scientific advisors calls for a circuit breaker lockdown. In the run up to the deadliest weeks of the pandemic the papers were calling for Johnson to “Save Christmas’. The full role of the media requires its own series.

Another group I didn't have space to add is Time4Recovery/the Recovery Alliance. Founded by Jon Dobinson the group donated to the CRG MPs and ran a PR campaign against school closures on behalf of UsForThem in the winter of 2020. There is no record of where Time4Recovery received its funding from, but Jon Dobinson was previously involved in World4Brexit with Steve Bannon and Pamela Popper, who in 2020 was raising funds for legal challenges conducted by Thomas Renz, America’s Frontline Doctors lawyer of choice. Popper and Renz both appeared as speakers at a Truth For Health event in 2021.

The end of 2020 was the start of two new waves of disinformation. With HCQ proven to be ineffective the alternative treatments grifters had turned to Ivermectin as their new wonder drug, and with covid vaccines being rolled out the covid disinformation ecosystem merged with the antivax movement, although there was already considerable crossover 2021 allowed anti-vax narratives to break into the mainstream.

The final addition to the map is HART founded at the very end of 2021. Containing almost all of Pandata's UK based members, HART's leaked chat logs revealed members to be anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, entertaining crazy ideas such as vaccines being used to make people “WiFi enabled”, and yet this group established themselves as the “scientific” advisors to the CRG MPs, providing evidence to All Party Parliamentary Groups and were platformed across the right wing media with some ending up as presenters and regular commentators on the likes of GB News and TalkTv.

HART is effectively the UK's Pandata, coordinating across different disinformation groups and spawning many offshoots, members include: Patrick Fagan, Clare Craig, Michael Yeadon, Ellen Townsend, Ros Jones and Will Jones of the Daily Sceptic. The GBD authors were participants in the leaked private chats logs, and the leaks shows how HART were collaborating with the CRG MPs and various journalists.

An incomplete map just of HART's links.

The covid disinformation ecosystem started as an astroturfing campaign constructed at speed, willing to recruit and collaborate with anyone who would reinforce the alternative narrative

This is a little embarrassing to share, but I’d rather someone else be able to spot a dangerous scam before they fall for it. So, here goes.

One evening last month, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and Mac all lit up with a message prompting me to reset my password. This came out of nowhere; I hadn’t done anything to elicit it. I even had Lockdown Mode running on all my devices. It didn’t matter. Someone was spamming Apple’s legitimate password reset flow against my account—a technique Krebs documented back in 2024. I dismissed the prompts, but the stage was set.

What made the attack impressive was the next move: The scammers actually contacted Apple Support themselves, pretending to be me, and opened a real case claiming I’d lost my phone and needed to update my number. That generated a real case ID, and triggered real Apple emails to my inbox, properly signed, from Apple’s actual servers. These were legitimate; no filter on earth could have caught them.

Then “Alexander from Apple Support” called. He was calm, knowledgeable, and careful. His first moves were solid security advice: check your account, verify nothing’s changed, consider updating your password. He was so good that I actually thanked him for being excellent at his job.

That, of course, was when he moved into the next phase of the attack.

He texted me a link to review and cancel the “pending request.” The site, <a href="http://audit-apple.com" rel="nofollow">audit-apple.com</a>, was a pixel-perfect Apple replica, and displayed the exact case ID from the real emails I’d just received. There was even a fake chat transcript of the scammers’ actual conversation with Apple, presented back to me as evidence of the attack against my account. At the bottom of the page was a Sign in with Apple button that he told me to use.

I started poking at the page and noticed I could enter any case ID and get the same result. Nothing was being validated. It was all theater.

“This is really good,” I told Alexander. “This is obviously phishing. So tell me about the scam.”

Silence. *Click*.

Once I’d suspected what was happening, I’d started recording the call, so I was able to save a good chunk of it, which Jamie Marsland used to make a video about the encounter. You can hear for yourself exactly how convincing “Alexander” was.

So let my almost-disaster help you avoid your own. Remember these rules.

• Don’t approve any password-reset prompts—those are the first part of the attack. Do not pass Go, just head directly to your Apple ID settings. 
• Apple will never call you first. 
• When you get an email from Apple—or, really, anyone telling you to complete a digital security measure—check the URL they’re trying to send you to. Apple Support lives on <a href="http://apple.com" rel="nofollow">apple.com</a> and <a href="http://getsupport.apple.com" rel="nofollow">getsupport.apple.com</a>, nowhere else.

After all, the best protection is knowing what this looks like before it happens.

Thank you to Peter Rubin and Jamie Marsland for putting this all together.

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ALVARADO, Texas (AP) — A Palestinian woman who was the last person still in immigration detention after the Trump administration’s 2025 crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses was freed Monday after a year in custody.

Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old from the West Bank who has lived in New Jersey since 2016, had been held in a U.S. immigration detention center in Texas since last March. Her detention was linked, in part, to her participation in a protest outside Columbia University in 2024.

“I don’t know what to say. I’m free! I’m free! Finally, after one year,” Kordia, with a beaming smile, told reporters after emerging from the detention center.

An immigration judge had ordered her released on bond three times. The government challenged the first two rulings, but Kordia was freed Monday on $100,000 bond after it did not challenge the third.

Kordia said she was looking forward to going home and hugging her mother “so hard.” But she also said she would keep fighting on behalf of people still being held at the detention center.

“There is a lot of injustice in this place,” she said. “There is a lot of people that shouldn’t be here the first place.”

Kordia was among a number of people arrested last year after the Trump administration began using its immigration enforcement powers on noncitizens who had criticized or protested Israel’s military actions in Gaza, many students and scholars at American universities.

Among them was Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student involved in campus protests. He spent three months detained in a Louisiana immigration jail before being freed. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student who co-authored an op-ed criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war, was detained for six weeks.

Others did not fight to stay — one Columbia doctoral student fled the U.S. after her visa was revoked and immigration agents showed up at her university apartment.

Arrests of activists like Khalil drew condemnation from elected officials and advocates. But Kordia was not a student or part of a group that might have provided support, so her case remained largely out of the public eye while her detention carried on.

Kordia said she joined a 2024 demonstration outside Columbia University after Israel killed scores of her relatives in Gaza, where she maintains deep personal ties. She was around 100 people arrested by city police at that protest, but the charges against her were dismissed and sealed. Information about her arrest was later given to the Trump administration by the New York City Police Department, which said it was told the records were needed as part of a money laundering investigation.

Kordia was arrested during a March 13, 2025, check-in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New Jersey. She was detained immediately and flown to Prairieland Detention Center, south of Dallas.

Federal officials have accused Kordia of overstaying her visa, while scrutinizing payments she sent to relatives in the Middle East. Kordia said the money was meant to help family members suffering during the war.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, had previously criticized Kordia for what she said was “providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the U.S.” A message seeking comment was sent to the department Monday evening.

An immigration judge found “overwhelming evidence” that Kordia was telling the truth about the payments.

Kordia was recently hospitalized for three days following a seizure after fainting and hitting her head at the privately run detention facility.

At a hearing Friday, Kordia’s attorneys said she had a neurological condition that had worsened while in custody, putting her at an elevated risk of seizure. They reiterated that she could stay with U.S. citizen family members and did not pose a flight risk.

The immigration judge, Tara Naslow, agreed.

“I’ve heard testimony. I’ve seen thousands of pages of evidence presented by the respondent, and very little evidence presented by the government in any of this,” Naslow said.

An attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, Anastasia Norcross, said the government opposed the release of Kordia, regardless of the bond. She did not say at the time whether it would appeal for a third time.

Kordia’s advocates cheered her release.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he asked for her release when he met with President Donald Trump last month

Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Travis Fife said they were celebrating but still had work to do.

“Leqaa going home today is the bare minimum,” Fife said in a prepared statement. “We must continue to assert the fundamental First Amendment principle that the government cannot abuse power to punish people for using their voice.”

___

Offenhartz reported from New York.