Universities worldwide are pausing in an attempt to contain COVID-19’s spread. In February 2019, universities in China took the lead, cancelling all in-person classes and switching to virtual classrooms, with a wave of other institutes globally following suit. The shift to online platform poses serious challenges to medical education so that understanding best practices shared by pilot institutes may help medical educators improve teaching. Provide 12 tips to highlight strategies intended to help on-site medical classes moving completely online under the pandemic. We collected ‘best practices’ reports from 40 medical schools in China that were submitted to the National Centre for Health Professions Education Development. Experts’ review-to-summary cycle was used to finalize the best practices in teaching medical students online that can benefit peer institutions most, under the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 outbreak. The 12 tips presented offer-specific strategies to optimize teaching medical students online under COVID-19, specifically highlighting the tech-based pedagogy, counselling, motivation, and ethics, as well as the assessment and modification. Learning experiences shared by pilot medical schools and customized properly are instructive to ensure a successful transition to e-learning.

While the Institute of Education Science’s ERIC is often recommended for comprehensive literature searching in the field of education, there are several other specialized education databases to discover education literature. This study investigates journal coverage overlaps between four specialized education databases: Education Source (EBSCO), Education Database (ProQuest), ERIC (Institute of Education Sciences), and Educator’s Reference Complete (Gale). Out of a total of 4,695 unique journals analyzed, there are 2,831 journals uniquely covered by only one database, as well as many journals covered by only two or three databases. Findings show that evidence synthesis projects and literature reviews benefit from the careful selection of multiple specialized education databases and that ERIC is insufficient as the primary education database for comprehensive searching in the field.

To illuminate barriers to collaboration, this study examines who participates in cross-boundary scholarly collaboration most often and which types of boundary crossing (disciplinary, institutional, role) are engaged in most often. The data of this study came from an interdisciplinary consortium with five partner institutions, including one Historically Black College and University (HBCU). The core disciplines involved in the consortium are life sciences, computer science and math and engineering. Through statistical analysis, we determined that members of the consortium engaged more in interdisciplinary research than inter-institutional research. Participation in all boundary crossing collaborations was greater at the HBCU and students and postdocs were less likely than academics to cross-institutional boundaries.