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BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic is expected to cause significant morbidity and mortality. The development of an effective vaccine will take several months to become available, and its affordability is unpredictable. Transfusion of convalescent plasma (CP) may provide passive immunity. Based on initial data from China, a group of hematologists, infectious disease specialists, and intensivists drafted this protocol in March 2020. ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to test the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of CP in treating patients with COVID-19 across Saudi Arabia. MethodsEligible patients with COVID-19 will be recruited for CP infusion according to the inclusion criteria. As COVID-19 has proven to be a moving target as far as its management is concerned, we will use current definitions according to the Ministry of Health (MOH) guidelines for diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. All CP recipients will receive supportive management including all available recommended therapies according to the available MOH guidelines. Eligible CP donors will be patients with COVID-19 who have fully recovered from their disease according to MOH recovery criteria as detailed in the inclusion criteria. CP donors have to qualify as blood donors according to MOH regulations except for the history of COVID-19 in the recent past. We will also test the CP donors for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies by a rapid test, and aliquots will be archived for future antibody titration. Due to the perceived benefit of CP, randomization was not considered. However, we will compare the outcome of the cohort treated with CP with those who did not receive CP due to a lack of consent or lack of availability. In this national collaborative study, there is a likelihood of not finding exactly matched control group patients. Hence, we plan to perform a propensity score matching of the CP recipients with the comparator group patients for the major characteristics. We plan to collect demographic, clinical, and laboratory characteristics of both groups and compare the outcomes. A total sample size of 575 patients, 115 CP recipients and 460 matched controls (1:4 ratio), will be sufficient to detect a clinically important hospital stay and 30-day mortality difference between the two groups with 80% power and a 5% level of significance. ResultsAt present, patient recruitment is still ongoing, and the interim analysis of the first 40 patients will be shared soon. ConclusionsIn this paper, we present a protocol for a national collaborative multicenter phase II study in Saudi Arabia for assessing the feasibility, safety, and potential efficacy of CP in treating patients with severe COVID-19. We plan to publish an interim report of the first 40 CP recipients and their matched comparators soon. Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04347681; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04347681 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)PRR1-10.2196/23543

The current coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic caused a temporary halt to educational activities around the world. The abrupt and fast shift from regular face-to-face learning to fully online learning altered the students' impressions toward the Blackboard application and its use. It is important to have an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of using the blackboard platform in developing students' skills. The current study included a review of both quantitative and qualitative papers according to their relevance to the Saudi context to get a clearer image about the use of blackboard in building up Saudi EFL learners speaking skills. The purpose of this study is to address and review the studies that investigate students' perceptions of the Blackboard program as a mere tool of learning English courses in Preparatory Year, as well as the impact of those perceptions on students' use of Blackboard. This work underlines previous literature associated with blackboard as a platform in the practice of speaking skills in the English language among Saudi English as Foreign Language (EFL) Learners. It is meant to provide an overview of how Blackboard computer and internet-based virtual class (CIBVC) is used to overcome Saudi EFL learners' difficulties in English-speaking skills and describes their speaking ability from the perspectives of accuracy, fluency, and Anxiety. This work suggests that the students' earlier knowledge of online learning via Blackboard has a positive impact on their perceptions. It also contributed to online learning of English language speaking skills and the learning via the online learning platforms' research field during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.

Chinese learners are poor at oral English owing to a lack of practice. There is a high demand for opportunities to practice oral English effectively. This study investigates the use of three educationally significant ways of talking to Chinese learners' meaningful oral English development in one-to-one Computer- and Internet-Based Virtual Classes (CIBVC). It is a qualitative case study including two sets of data that contain 64 video-recorded lessons. One set of data are 32 class recordings from one participant as the primary data and the other are from another four participants as the supplementary data. Thematic analysis is employed to carry out this study and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software is utilized to assist. The findings of this study discover effective ways of using the three ways of talking to conduct oral English teaching and learning practice. The results contribute to research into relating authentic communication in CIBVC to the discovery of effective oral English practice. Obtained practical implications are valuable references as predictors of successful teaching and learning outcomes.