Games are played for entertainment and have the ability to stimulate a variety of moods during gameplay, including happiness. Serious or applied games are created and used to serve a purpose rather than purely for entertainment. The relationship between mood and task efficiency has been investigated in psychology with contrasting results, and it also appears that there is a relationship between mood and learning. Players' mood and learning efficiency as a consequence of playing two serious games involving navigation in a virtual environment as the main action of gameplay, but with different learning objectives, have been investigated. The first game trained players to perform a religious ritual, while the second taught the route to a real world destination. The pre-and post-gameplay mood of 52 players were noted. It was found that both serious games helped the players develop a pleasant overall mood and significantly increased the self-reported happiness score in the post-questionnaire. It was also found that players who felt happier spent more time learning and that women performed better when they were happier. Also, younger learners tend to obtain a higher learning performance score than other age categories.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is currently the most potent threat to educational systems, a crisis that may become disastrous. For the current study, a qualitative design within a case study tradition was implemented to investigate instructional barriers during COVID-19 faced by Indonesian teachers in Islamic boarding schools (Pesantren). Within this study, we applied a purposeful convenient sampling in which the access was obtained through communication with the principals of two Pesantren. Seven invited participants with more than ten years of teaching experience agreed to participate. Semi-structured interviews were addressed for data collection; each interview lasted from 40 to 50 min. The interviews were conducted in the participants’ mother tongue to provide an in-depth understanding of their perceptions, ideas, and arguments regarding instructional barriers during the COVID-19 outbreak. The thematic analysis revealed three major findings regarding the barriers; technological barriers, financial barriers, and pedagogical barriers affecting instructional activities in the two Pesantren. Based on the three themes, the development of a qualitative conceptual map of teachers’ instructional barriers was finalized. Recommendations are also proposed by the participants and the study for the betterment of Indonesian Islamic education facing future similar outbreaks.

Needs analysis is a technique in collecting and accessing information relevant to course design. In the needs analysis, the interview is one of the methods and it involves asking in-depth questions using a structured or semi-structured guide to better understand the individual’s points of view. A pilot test for an interview is an important and useful process in conducting qualitative research. Its findings might indicate that some improvements for the major study are needed. This article will explore the advantages of the pilot study, how it was undertaken and the experiences and findings throughout the study. The pilot test was conducted by interviewing two nursing lecturers using Google Meet. This pilot test was conducted with three stages of an interview process such as a pre-interview, peri-interview and post-interview. There were no serious modifications were needed after data analysis of the pilot study was done. It indicates that the research instruments, semi-structured questions can be considered as valid and reliable and can be used for the real study. At the same time, the researcher recognized that the MOOC course and communication at risk module need details explanation because they are new for the participants and to make clear distinction between risk communication and therapeutic communication. This study gives the researchers valuable experiences in applying the three stages of the interview session. The most important, the findings of this study can be applied in the real study

Health care practitioners are trained to deal with patients' emotionally intense situations, and being able to listen and explain complex issues to patients is an essential attribute of a health care professional [1]. However, practitioners might not be aware that their emotional state influences their perceptions of the world, what they remember and decisions they take [2].Emotions are considered feelings, and that bodily change occurs after an emotion is experienced. However, according to the perceptual theory of emotion, bodily changes precede emotional experiences, which in turn, modulate mental processes. In such theory, emotions are seen as 'cognitive' , rather than a subjective phenomenon. The experience of the world shapes our emotional representation of it, and in turn, our emotional predisposition does not affect only our behaviour, but also our inclination towards the events in our life [3,4]. In a recent study, we found that emotions also influenced the amount of information people learned and the knowledge transferred from the training into the real world [5].McConnell and Eva extensively reviewed the literature on the influence of emotion in learning and the resulting transfer of skills and knowledge to the real world [6]. They concluded that emotion influences how learners identify, perceive, interpret information and act during training. They advocated that more research is needed in the area of emotion and learning to ensure that trainees are effectively prepared for any emotional condition in the real world.We investigated how mood influenced learning and found that participants felt significantly happier after gaining knowledge in serious or applied games, a game designed to fulfil an objective, rather than mere entertainment [5]. As such, serious games can contribute to the creation of pleasurable learning experience. We also found that men were happier than women to learn through playing applied games.